Posted by
Joyanna Adams on Sunday, November 09, 2008 10:30:36 PM
Nobody’s Opinion: It’s pretty sad, when you finally met someone in college that wants to discuss the world and all its issues, and the discussion comes thirty years too late.
Yeah, I had to wait that long.
I was sitting in my local vet’s office yesterday, waiting patiently for the “doctor” to fill some antibiotics for my parakeet, when a big speckled dog, came slopping up to me, with his big head begging for attention. On the end of his leash was a young man, who looked almost the same as the young men did when I went to college.
We started talking about the election, and he told me he was going to the same local university that I had attended years ago, and was majoring in psychology with minors in social studies, and women’s studies.
As if women can be studied. You’d think they’d learn by now. In my day, those were considered the “easy” subjects.
Still, the young man reminded me of myself when I went to college---eager to converse about everything and anything. I was so idealistic that once, when I was visiting a boyfriend at Yale, I would have given anything just to live as the ivy on the walls so that I could listen to the thoughts of the great men that taught there.
I used to sit for hours in the campus lunch room hoping beyond all hope, for a decent conversation on someone’s class they'd just had, or a book they'd just read… I never had one.
Later on, after I was out of college, I dated my brilliant history teacher, and I still didn’t have one, even though we met for lunch every week for five years. Intelligent men do not want to have intelligent conversation with pretty women. My teacher seemed heartbroken when I finally broke it off---and he was “intelligent.”
I exchanged e-mail addresses with the young man, but I’m reluctant to contact him…because by his conversation, I know he is being brainwashed by his teachers. How did I find this out? He was appalled that people still believed in the old fashioned concept of private property.
Say what?
Really---he actually couldn’t believe that people wanted to have their own private property. He loved Norm Chomsky. I wanted to ask him if he did not own his own house, then where in the world did his half horse of a dog roam?…but I held myself in check.
Then I remember my college days. You’re young. You have all these questions, and you want to understand everything. I craved for intelligent conversations about anything. I would have talked about UFO’s...SOMEBODY HELP ME! “Please! Somebody say something!” They never did.
I wanted to major in Philosophy, but that ended soon enough, when my philosophy teacher was such a jerk, I stopped attending classes. Three years later, he finally failed me, which shows you just how I was right about the man. He waited three years…and I only attended the first three classes. I would have flunked me the first semester.
He always gave me an “incomplete.” What?---was he expecting I was going to return and apologize for insulting his idol?
You see...on the first day of class, he wanted us all to write a thesis on Socrates. Well, no one knew a thing about the man. He didn’t assign us anything to read, and so I wrote my Rocky Balboa Theory, which is: Socrates was such an ugly hunchback of a man that he had to develop his brain. I still stand by my reasoning.
The next day Dr. Fuss really laid into all of us about how not one of us could write a decent paper. And he was right. But, it wasn’t the fault of anyone in that room. We were all lower middle class and had gone though 18 years of a sheer garbage disposal of a school system that hadn’t bothered to teach us much of anything.
But was it the teachers’ fault? Nooooooooo, he blamed the kids. We were, according to him, each and every one of us stupid. We all grew up and demanded gas guzzlers.
I figured any man who could so blatantly blame this on us was a moron. I realized after a few classes that he had no intention of teaching us anything. He had tenure.
Looking back, it took me thirty years to realize that the university that I went to was completely indoctrinated by “communistic” teaching. It was my college boyfriend who got me into reading Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and “Three Who Made A Revolution.” I thought, at the time, I was reading the real answers to life---I was young.
And as we saw by the communistic flags flying in front of the White House after Obama was elected, it hasn’t changed at all, but gotten much worse.
As I was talking to this kid, I remembered back on my college days, and how I would have given the world to have walked into the campus lunch room, and run into him when I was thirty years younger and talked about the meaning of it all…
But of course, he would not have talked to me; his mind would have been on sex. Not his fault--- it’s just funny how life is all screwed up that way…that’s all.
And no amount of women's studies is going to change it.