Wear the Flops

Alex Gervais ’28

Exec. Opinion and Design Editor

Take a walk ‘neath the elms on a beautiful April day at Trinity and you’ll see a universal piece of footwear: flip-flops. The sandal takes over this campus every spring, the open-toed shoe blooms alongside the cherry blossoms outside of Williams. Enjoyed by frat bros, math professors and everyone else in between on our campus, flops have become one of the true pillars of our culture here at Trinity. 

I used to be stringently anti-flops, my freshman fall you couldn’t have paid me to have my toes out at a lecture — oh the horror! Yet, as I embarked on my fourth semester here, I felt spring coming around the corner and a distinct itch for freer footwear. Call it commercial or genuine, but maybe the ‘flip-flops and jeans JFK Jr style’ TikToks effectively propagandized me. Now, I find myself wearing them everywhere, my friends remarking that I look “really Trinity.” 

But isn’t that what we should be? We should all be “really Trinity.” The flops are a symbol for a larger force that brings all of us together, that makes us all feel like true, valued members of this community. We all chose to come to this strange, not air-conditioned, beautiful place; and as I opined last week, we choose to stay. 

Maybe your flops are Rainbows, maybe they’re Reefs (my flop of choice), maybe they’re Birkenstocks or maybe they’re not even flops at all. Maybe they’re going to Pike on a Saturday night or joining a cultural affinity club. Maybe your symbol of what it means to participate at Trinity is different from mine; that’s good, it should be. The college experience is not a monolith and never can be, we all interact with this place in our own unique ways, nobody doing it exactly the same way each of us will.

But, the only way to actually craft our own unique experience is to chase it. It’s easy to resist participating in anything on our campus: we can all sit around and make fun of Psi U on Yik Yak (or in the Liepod), we can relentlessly — and rightfully — complain about the food at Mather, we can rot in our dorms all day and doomscroll reels instead of going to club meetings. As college students we have ultimate agency, some of us insulated from the real world for four more years. 

Yet, now is the time to embrace those responsibilities of the real world, specifically the responsibility we have to build our own communities. The bonds between each of us are rapidly being ripped apart in our country: only 42 percent of Americans under the age of 30 feel close to people in their local community. The systemic roots of our rapidly accelerating isolation are evident, they’ve come at the hands of the tech oligarchs who profit each time we pick up our phones and the monopolistic producers who gain each time we choose to chase a trend instead of considering our own wants. As Marx would put it, the “sentimental veil” is gone, community has become a “mere money relation.” Community becomes less and less real each time we choose not to genuinely participate in it.

During our time at Trinity we must practice what it means to be a member of a community so we can one day break the dangerous cycle of isolation. We must show up for our friends, even when it’s inconvenient for us. We must contribute to our group projects no matter how idiotic our slides look. We must strengthen that muscle of community that pulls us all together on this campus. These are the times of our lives, talk to most alumni and you’ll hear that they’d give anything to get these precious four years back. When we’re gone from here we’ll think of each accidental hour and a half lunch at Mather we had, each afternoon we spent on the Quad, each time we stayed up until 4 a.m. just talking. We’ll think of everything that made Trinity, Trinity. 

So, I ask you to wear your flops, whatever form they may take. Maybe you have three weeks left on campus, maybe you have three years, but no matter what you can still participate in this place. You can make peace with it, learn from it, help it grow.