Usage

I'm no grammar saint. I make mistakes. I leave out apostrophes, misuse commas, but I proofread and ask myself if it is, indeed, too much. I smirk when I walk past a deli advertising "grocery's" or a store renting "video's." Today I saw a "goes" spelled "go's." Freshman year, I took a class during which we had to pass our rough drafts around and critique each other's work. I was too hung up on the sentence structure and punctuation to spend much time on the content. Forget "Writing the Essay," we needed "Writing the Sentence."
So today I was particularly disappointed by the essays Nicolas Kristoff chose to be the finalists for his "Come Document Devistation in Africa!" contest. As my sarcasm may suggest, I don't think much of this trip. I think it's akin to Oprah showing victims of car accidents who have had their faces burned off or allowing housewives to feel "the horror of the Holocaust" through the eyes of someone who experienced it. It's just pornography for the soul-dead. The winner even claims to want to "break people's hearts thoroughly."
I've often enjoyed and agreed with Kristof's articles, but this entire contest seems to be mis-guided. When announcing the contest, he alleged that American students, even those who study abroad, are sheltered and ignorant (my words.) Something about doing more drinking than studying, I believe. He encouraged all college students to take a gap year and travel the world and investigate other countries and cultures, supposedly to right perceived wrongs. A virtuous goal, no doubt, but the essays that were chosen as finalists hardly reflect it.
Instead they vacillate between a litany of complaints concerning childhoods marred by poverty and divorce and self-satisfied boasts of prior accomplishments including trespassing, reading newspapers and pissing oneself. I come away believing that mass media has so warped the general conscience of this country that we think any ripple or hiccup in our lives is a sign of insurmontable tragedy, and that our penchant for self-promotion is insatiable. I have experienced death and divorce and poverty, but I would never disrespect my mother so thoroughly as to degrade her sacrificies to further myself. Even if I were to, I would use proper syntax.