Peer pressure leads to immature acts, revelry

Succumbing to peer pressure: it's quite dumb. Just ask the freshman punks here that decided to riot last week.

Hats off to the administration for cracking down. But the current Internet version of "Purdue's Most-Wanted" seems a little overdone.

We should've hired McGruff "The Crime Dog" instead. He would've had the perpetrators rounded up before you could say, "Take a bite out of crime."

Seriously, who's going to turn in their friends, even if there is a reward? And there are too many redundant pictures of the revelers on the Web site. Who wants to look through hundreds of blurry pictures? Hell, even my mom's in one of them. So if you catch her, don't turn her in. She's innocent, was just passing by.

Want to curb future riots?

Put the dorms on lockdown.

I'm serious. Only let the women out because women don't start fires.

What is so great about setting 200 fires anyway? When one got going, another automatically had to be started.

But the next one had to be bigger, or the guys that started it wouldn't be as cool as the original super cool guys that started the first really cool fire.

Anyway, riots were last week's news. I only brought it up because I'm going to talk about the more broad area of peer pressure.

Why is there peer pressure?

Because everyone wants to be cool.

And to be cool, many are willing to do things they normally wouldn't. When humans get into groups, our level of intelligence sinks to the level of a really dumb monkey.

For example, at football games these "monkeys'' throw cups full of pop (pronounced "soda" back in New York) into the crowd below. Do you think they do stuff like that when they're alone? I hope not.

There are countless examples of peer pressure in everyday life as well.

It's why Abercrombie is so popular. It's why many women here can't survive a weekend without their tight black pants.

It's why 23 percent of this country smokes. Do you honestly think that that many people decided to start smoking, thinking, "You mean I get to destroy my lungs and spend hundreds of dollars a year doing it? Where do I sign up!"

No, it's because everyone else at work did it, and you didn't want to keep standing there feeling left out.

You know how to rid yourself of peer pressure? There are two things you need.

The first is independence. Some have no clue what that word means, because from day one they've relied on others to do everything. They haven't learned how to make they're own decisions so others easily influence them. This makes them vulnerable to peer pressure.

Independence means making decisions yourself and not letting others affect you. Hate to break it to you, but we're practically adults now. And as adults we need to think independently.

The second ingredient is self-confidence. Ever heard of the saying "It's not what others think of you, it's what you think." While it sounds quite corny (our parents tell us this), it's true. Why should it matter so much what others think?

What the hell do they know anyway?

I mean, care a little, or else you'll be single and friendless for your whole life, but don't think that another's impression of you is the only thing that matters.

Self confidence leads to having pride in yourself. And pride is the key; it's like kryptonite to peer pressure. When you have pride in yourself, you don't care that you're not following the crowd, because you know that you're the one doing the right thing. You believe in yourself so peer pressure doesn't stand a chance.

Listen, peer pressure was for high school. The days of "homeroom" are over; we're in college now.

You've had two decades to figure out what cool is. Now the cool thing to do is trust what you've learned, have confidence in it, and live by it. And in the process, don't let the pressure of others corrupt your ethics.

Let everyone else be the idiots. Sooner or later they'll realize how dumb they were. It's a great feeling knowing you stopped yourself from doing something stupid that others thought was the cool thing at the time.

So when your friends get the keen idea that it'd be fun to go flip over a Mercedes, take a step back and think about it. Don't let peer pressure get the best of you. Sure you might not look "cool" at the moment, but at least you won't be one of Purdue's Most-Wanted.

Next Monday's column: super profs.

Brian Dillon is a junior in the school of Technology.

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