Citizens of Humanity*

The day before the highly anticipated, emotionally-charged BCS national title game, which our university's team was playing in, I excitedly asked another graduate student where they'd be watching the game. "What game?" they responded.
This slice is scarily a representative one of what it means to be a PhD candidate, or more generally, a graduate student: technically you are still a citizen of humanity...just, well... twice removed.
Let me backtrack. There is the saying that when you are in college (i.e. undergrad), you're in a bubble- not keenly aware of world events, important political issues, or frankly of the weather 50 miles outside the perimeter of Eden. Really all that matters is campus life, the school's sports teams' performances, and national holidays are only considered significant if they equate to a day off from class. And while this bubble may be impervious to the "real world," it seems the danger of such a bubble does not reach precarious levels.
Graduate school, on the other hand, affords the recipe for an actual jeopardous existence. Graduate life, of course, is not only safely sealed off from the real world; it's additionally sheltered from the events constituting campus culture (like, say, a national championship bid!) Effectively, we find ourselves in a "double bubble." And that is dangerous: for while the first bubble perhaps shields us from the unpleasant things of the world- thus a blasé bubble, a good bubble- the second bubble translates more to an armor to the serenity afforded by the first, outer bubble.
Sure, there is the occasional outlier grad student who's a triple threat- is up-to-date on the war on terrorism, attends all of the university's sporting events, and somehow still finds time to do groundbreaking research (I know this may not sound like a traditional triple threat combination to anyone outside of academia by the way :P)- but even this is a rarity. We graduate students are then a distilled population operating in a vacuum-like setting, supposedly generating relevant knowledge for those a world or two away.
So just as you have those distant cousins, once, twice, four times removed (whatever number pleases you), with whom you seldom interact, and to whom you're not really related in the kind of emotionally-attached, kinship kind of way, the bubble life of grad students- that is, the double bubble- requires that we qualify our citizenship of humanity with an *. And this asterisk reduces our relation to other citizens of humanity as citizens twice removed.