Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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When we got back to school in September, we got the news. AAU has a house! lt's an ugly house, rather like a Frank Lloyd Wright nightmare, but it's big and comfort- able, and best of all, 10091: ours. It's a place to go when the grey gothic gargoyles become unbearable. It's a place with one sink, one toilet, and one bathtub in the bathroom . . . a place where people become individuals, not cubicles off a main hall. It's a place to go play bridge when you don't have a date, or make lasagna when you do. It's a place just to be friends. 28

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OMEGA HOUSE - SOME CONCLUSIONS - A successful commune resembles a closeknit egalitarian family. - In most such communes the members are committed to a common ideal beyond community itself. - The costs are time, work, and committment: a price too high for most. - A group forming a commune should be clear on why they are com- ing together and on how great a committment they will make. - Communes require giving and sharing, those who play low-pot games are wasting their time in a commune. - Responsible anarchy is a fine ideal, but while this ability is develop- ing only a KP list will get everything done. - Failure to meet expectations breeds guilt, which breeds impotence, which leads to more failure. If you don't like yourself, you probably won't like being in a commune. - Martyrs and silent sufferers eventually blow up. - Communes tend to amplify, rather than cure, most hang-ups. A MINORITY REPORT BY STEVE WOODALL Admitting that I am as much, or perhaps more, of a culprit as the rest of Omega West, I feel it only appropriate that I resume one more time my role as Mr. Negative , chief critic, and floor mopper. I tend to be critical of half-assed ideals, preferring no ideals to ill-conceived or ill-performed ones. The overwhelming impression that I have as I leave Omega House is how very ill-prepared students at Duke fand perhaps everywhere elsej are to deal with what I feel should be called REALITY. An ideal which supposedly motivates O.H. is a respect for human life and, as a conse- quence, a desire to support each other during moments of joy, struggle, and, most importantly, sorrow. I find that the group is able to give support only in the first of these instances. In other words, everybody loves a winner. The point is not that I expect things to be different, but that each person should know himself well enough to know whether or not he can offer more than a fair-weather friendship. And, secondly, let me make public my gut-level rejection of the fraternityfsorority style of life. Having done that, I must reject this year's Omega West. My main objection is the pressure that can arise from any such group to change the behavior of certain individuals in the group. Individual freedom was stressed - community was what we were supposed to be about. Neither became realities, because this very duality became a tool with which individuals could manipulate the rest of the group to achieve personal desires which had been brought with them. Whether it is an advantage or a burden I don't know for sure, but at any rate, the only common denominator we had as a group was our Duke education. Our heterogeneity not only kept us from becom- ing a community, but led some of us into over-reacting and rebelling against the false ideals of community itself. And, thirdly, I am resentful of the facade that our group tried to erect for Duke and Durham, one pretending that we had placed our- selves closer to the day-to-day realities encountered in the outside world, that we had established a kinship with Mr. Natural, or, even better, the working class. But we had never escaped from the ivory tower: the inanity of assuming that problems would disappear by sim- ply sitting down and discussing them was barely perceived, money for us seemingly did grow on trees, for we had the best of everything. In short, we were to be envied, not for what we did, but for what was so lavishly given to us, no strings attached. A dream. Not a bad dream, but nonetheless, a dream. 30