Joe Essid directs the Writing Center at the University of Richmond, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is a Richmond native who attended the University of Virginia and earned a Master's and PhD at Indiana University. His research interests include technology in the classroom and Southern literary humor. His academic writing has appeared in Computers and Humanities, The Writing Lab Newsletter, and anthologies about technology and writing. He is a contributor to Style Weekly and has appeared in Eighty One and RVA. Ignatius Onomatopoeia is the "avatar" who represents Joe in the game-world Second Life. Ignatius will be wandering the virtual terrain of Second Life while his creator writes here about what may be either "the next big thing" for the Internet or the latest darling of the cyber-hip... the reader can decide.
E-mail contact: jessid@mac.com | Web address: writing2.richmond.edu/jessid

Location: Shopping for Freebies

When I saw the sign pictured here, at first I actually got a little angry.  “Be Eighteen Again, Forever”?  Uh-huh.  Good enough reason to get a real life.

But when I thought of the mirror that Second Life holds up to our world, I rethought my revulsion.  Consider how Americans live an illusion; I cannot speak for other nations.

How many of us:

—Act as if oil is not a war-starting resource in scarce supply within our borders and, realizing that, try to cut our use of it?

—Believe that our lifestyle, called “sacred” in one presidential speech, cannot be modified to have a lighter environmental footprint?

—Shrug whenever our corporate-owned media discuss flag-pins on lapels and fail to mention that we spend billions monthly on an endless war while education for poorest Americans languish?

—Ignore the warning signs that Hurricane Katrina sent us about the desperation of many African-Americans and the vulnerability of our coastal cities to rising seas?

—Pretend that governmental and private debt will never influence the ways we live?

—Believe a bigger car, house, or even TV screen will bring happiness to our lives?

—Borrow more money instead of saving when we want something?

—Deploy “remedies,” from Botox and Rogaine to red convertibles, for the ageing of our bodies?

—Toss up our hands and say “nothing can be done”?

That last is the most pernicious illusion of them all.  It would be better to pretend to be 18 forever with an avatar.

Am I cynical?  No.  I believe that most people care about our collective futures and can change reality.  We did it in the Civil Rights era and are doing it again as we struggle to save our and other species from a very ticked-off Mother Earth.

But I’m jaded, to be sure. Reality does that to one with the years and the persistence of certain illusions that others see as real.

Too often my students—and what is the social aspect of college life but a temporary retreat from the pressures of reality?—say that SL a dangerous escape.  For some residents, it is.  And sometimes it seems less scary than the illusions around us in the real world.

Be sure to check the “In a Strange Land” Archive for old posts