Soon after graduating from law school, a young Barack Obama wrote memoirs detailing his drug and alcohol use during his high school and college years. Although he had no intention of running for public office at the time, his admission of drug use effectively covers his tracks from future indictment.
As college students, many of us have done things we regret in regard to partying in one form or another. Compounding that issue is the proliferation of taking digital pictures and storing them on the Internet, meaning our regrettable actions cannot be easily deleted. For anyone with high aspirations in the business or government world, the time has come to write memoirs covering our college tracks.
We have seen Bill Clinton claim he smoked marijuana once, but ""didn't inhale."" President George W. Bush conceded that he used cocaine and was an alcoholic, but his slate was wiped clean after his religious revitalization. By admitting these faults, presidents can gain trust from the American people, who appreciate their honesty. But those presidents did not have to worry about a bevy of incriminating evidence in the form of digital photos.
One has to imagine many of today's politicians and CEOs had their fair share of fun in college in the form of drug and alcohol use, but they know their pasts will stay behind them. The same cannot be said for the future generations.
Presidential candidates will have to answers questions relating to their questionable moral values, citing digital photos of underage drinking and promiscuity taken years before.
The American public does not view political figures as normal human beings. When trivial photos arise, politicians have to answer. Obama apologized for photos taken of him shirtless in the ocean in Hawaii. Obama even said he was embarrassed the photos were taken, as if he is supposed to wear a shirt whenever in the ocean. Maybe he regrets not wearing a suit and tie. The irony is that 12 years earlier he admitted using ""pot ... and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it"" in his memoir.
Obama is more concerned with the public seeing him shirtless than he is with them knowing he did drugs. This is because Obama has already put his past behind him in his memoir. If a photo of a topless male politician on the beach can create uproar, then what could a photo of that same politician taking shots years earlier do?
There are three possibilities for a solution to this hypothetical problem. The first is to not take part in anything that could be construed as illegal or immoral in order to enter the professional world with a clean slate, yet this curtails the amount of political candidates.
The second is to avoid photos altogether, but that is a difficult and awkward proposal. Lastly, we take Obama's route and confess to wrongdoings as a means of separating the past from the future.
For our generation, the reality is we may have to take Obama's path. College life has not changed significantly over the last few decades, but technology has. We aren't much different than our predecessors, except that we take pictures everywhere and plug them into a computer. Due to this reality, we have to put the past behind us to separate our professional life from our college life.
