I know I’m not imagining the fury and crushing disappointment Carleton students feel when they pick up a pear and find it inferior to basic standards of fruit ripeness. I understand and I respect your feelings.

While I have devised a few methods students can use to combat this flagrant lack of properly ripe pears, the problem of fruit ripeness is symptomatic of a far greater problem students must face. Although this plague of unripe pears first seems an evil unfairly endured, to seem is not to be.

Rather, this Crisis of the Pears is a challenge to the community, a call for action and change. This calls into question nothing less than the strength of our community’s moral and ethical integrity, nay, the very foundation of Carleton’s charter and bylaws. Underripe pears? What, I ask you, is to come of all this? If our pears be either too mushy or too firm, will our values as an institution one day become as soggy as the decrepit fruit disgracing our dining halls? Good citizens, I ask you, will they?

Every man and woman of this institution has a moral and ethical duty to do what they can to stop the eroding of our fruit-based values, and I have listed here, for your digestion, some steps you can take to shore up the Pear Crisis’ drain on the common good and happiness and create an Earth that is good and wholesome enough for your children to walk upon.

WHAT MUST YOU DO:

For the benefit of the entire community: a student may acquire a generic brown paper bag, and put all the unripe pears in it. The student may then devise a mathematical formula for systematically reintroducing the ripened pears into the dining halls’ streams of consumption, according to the fluctuations of student demand. The thinking student may even seek to create a steady supply of ripened pears by forming a sustainable cycle of ripened pears based on careful depletion and subsequent reintroduction methods.

For the radically minded: a student may empty and hoard the contents of the pear baskets, causing dramatic shortages, which will force the apparatchik “producers” to reform the pear system.

For dealing with the periodic batch of pears: make a nice pear galette or tart tatin.

May the answers be revealed by our conduct in these sad times, and may our actions bring an end to the present difficulties.