Fraternity Life - Part Two

Okay, so maybe deciding to end on a cliffhanger was kind of stupid considering this is just a blog, but I didn't exactly want to make my post the length of a novel, and considering how short attention spans are nowadays I wasn't exactly sure anyone could even finish the last one. And so here I am, ready to tie up loose ends. Here we go!

*ahem*

And thus I joined the fraternity.

The End.

*credits*

There, now wasn't that a great story? No? Well, I tried. Actually the rushing process was something that required my own involvement and interaction, so the fact that I made it all the way through pledging means that somewhere along the lines I actually realized I enjoyed being part of a fraternity and wanted to join.

"Pledging," for those not in the loop, is the process by which the new prospects, or pledges (or "pledgelings", if you are weird like me) are put through a "fraternization" program, if you will. They are educated in the ways of the fraternity: their values, history, and members, to name a few. "Rushing" is the activity of bringing new people into the fraternity.

The longer I spent at the fraternity house the more I had to rethink my ideas of what a fraternity is. A fraternity is not a group of guys who pop their polo collars, throw parties, get wasted, and wake up with their heads in the toilet. And this is contrary to everything I thought a fraternity was. What I thought was all about partying and shenanigans turned out to be a collection of men who strove to live their lives by their values, and be gentlemen. And while at times we can and will act like hooligans (and who wouldn't want to at least some of the time?) the people I now know as my brothers are individuals who are committed to being the best they can be. Most of the time.

This can be a number of things. We try our darnedest to excel academically. We treat people with respect. We listen. We think. We support our brothers, and anyone else. We are most certainly not what you see on TV. Unless you are watching some PBS special on how great fraternities are. In that case, yes, we are definitely like the ones you see on television.

The process of pledging can be kind of scary at times. The brothers tell us they don't haze (and they better not; it's against the rules of the school and probably against the law too) but I always had a voice in the back of my head not to trust anybody if there is a chance of hazing. To get every brother's signature on our pledge paddle (nothing actually gets paddled, it's just a tradition that we have them) we have to do something for them, and more often than not it was to either help them with a chore or just to hang out with them for a while. Nothing painful, nothing embarrassing, nothing evil. Just some good-natured stuff. After it was over I wondered why I worried about it so much.

Parents today spend so much time warning their children about fraternities and how horrible they are when they are preparing to head off to college, and then when you find out what they are really like you furrow your brow in confusion. How did this wrong idea begin? Some fraternities my be trouble, and that will probably not go away--and some more serious incidents at other schools might have had a place in the development of the fraternal stereotype. But the truth is, movies have this tendency to create and perpetuate false stereotypes, and these stereotypes somehow become a cultural fact (and websites dedicated to drunken fraternal follies do not help either). Our job as fraternity men is to prove them all wrong and to instead create and perpetuate brotherhood. And that is what we do.

I am proud to be an Alpha Sig.

Song of the Day

The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist