We all come to Evergreen for one reason or another, be it the close proximity it has to our homes, the education it gives students that’s unlike anything else in the college-universe, or that it was super easy to get into. Regardless of any of these reasons I can safely say that the “Geoduck spirit” on campus has waned since I’ve been here. In one form or another when we tell someone outside of Olympia where we attend school, the reactions are usually as follows, “Oh, that hippie school?” or, “Wow, so you never get grades?” or my favorite, “You guys smoke SO much weed!”
“Like in one sentence people will say how much they love Evergreen and how much of a joke it is because it’s non-traditional”, said sophomore Anna Robbins. I’ve grown numb to this line of answer and questioning. We are so much more than that Geoducks! We are more than just personalized, glass blown bongs and small classroom size statistics. We are a school that encourages us to not just think outside the box, but to grab that box, take a scissor to it and create a life size Kevin Bacon cut out and sell it for $12 outside of the CAB Building.
Do you know whose footsteps we can (try to) fill with our time with here? We could start with the most recent phenomenon to graduate from Evergreen, Ben Haggerty aka “Macklemore,” a rapper and entertainer who held the iTunes #1 position for his album, “The Heist” with no help from a major record label.
Then there’s the gaggle of animators including Byron Howard, the lead animator of “Lilo & Stitch”, a childhood classic film that we’ve ALL seen; Craig Bartlett, who created “Hey Arnold!” and worked on “Rugrats”; Matt Groening, the genius who gave us “The Simpsons” and “Futurama”; the always hilarious (and sometimes racist) Michael Richards that was Cosmo Kramer on “Seinfeld”; and of course, Carrie Brownstein, co-developer of “Portlandia” and singer/guitar player for Sleater Kinney and Wild Flag.
While all these people are cool to look up to and give some credibility to our school, observing only these factors is only skin deep. We should be proud that these people went to our school, but Evergreen is more than that.
We should be proud that our school had someone like Rachel Corrie walking through its campus.
Sam Popejoy, a senior at TESC found that, “it was really cool that we had someone at Evergreen like her that took a stand with the Palestinians.”
We have a lot to live up to, but we also have a tradition that we created for ourselves.
Anna said it best by stating, “One of the reasons a lot of people come to Evergreen is because they don’t fit that ‘rah rah’ shit. It’s a place where people intentionally choose to create a different type of school community and there’s a lot of pride in that.”
By Abraham Tadesse
