"A book with the receipt still in it"

Boomers grew up being told by our parents how difficult it would be "getting into college." College was a distant citadel for a chosen few. You'd better be prepared to scratch and grovel. It made us scared, just like so many things had us feeling scared and intimidated. Contentment in life was going to be an elusive commodity.
Our parents had been through so much adversity just getting to where they were. We heard their stories and were sobered. College was a citadel with a silk stocking quality. My father felt motivated to get through. I look through his scrapbook and am impressed. The college culture seemed something to be admired. We weren't all inspecting our navel as a culture, as what happened in a later time. (Always I'm reminded of the difference between "navel" and "naval.")
Maybe society should have been doing more self-analysis in the '30s and '40s. But college unabashedly and unapologetically embraced the values of Western civilization. My father ended up writing music that reflected those ideals. He wouldn't have been able to comprehend the alternative, to even get into a discussion about it. He served in WWII when, miserable as it was, there seemed no debate about how laudable the cause was. There's always a dirty underbelly but it was buried.
College in the 1970s seemed totally like an underbelly. Almost gone was any celebration of Western civilization. It seemed perverse for college, that citadel type of place, to have become a cauldron for all the deconstructionist stuff. The U.S. Bicentennial seems remote in the past now. It came at the height of 1970s cynicism and resignation. Something got infused in college culture that made us all want to withdraw from everything that seemed traditionally virtuous.
College was no longer so difficult to get into. Society had decided that if college is so cotton pickin' desirable, let's open the doors. Everyone knows that when a desirable commodity becomes more easily available, it can become cheapened. Teachers were set to lecture us on how everything we thought we knew was wrong! Certainly we had to question basic churchgoing. Words cannot describe the guilt trip which students got put on, as surely we were racists even though few of us had any consciousness of that.
College faculty absorbed people who were groomed by the counterculture. There was one inarguable reason behind the sea change: realization of the debacle of the Vietnam war. It was a debacle in every way, shape and form. Revelations come out to this day about the extent of that. We hear about the deliberate use of "low IQ troops." We hear about the "fragging," more extensive than we at first thought. If college teachers were inclined to pamper their students in the 1970s, to be tolerant of our silly culture much of the time, it was because of sheer thankfulness that we were not in Vietnam. It was a time for political liberalism of the paternalistic kind to gain great currency.
All of the blessings of our digital world of today could hardly be imagined. We consumed knowledge on paper. Everything had to be on paper and it had to be acquired. We went to the college bookstore to get our books. We hardly thought about how book publishing was a business model. It was a racket in the sense that books are commercial products that seek to yield profit. Didn't it seem unwieldy to have to read a whole "book" to get background on something? Isn't it painfully obvious, as we reflect, that books are padded in a way discouraging enthusiastic consumption of information?
Today we unapologetically get our information in bite-size pieces from our ubiquitous Internet tools. I grew up hearing all about Jesus Christ in church. I found in the present day that if I simply went to the Jesus Christ entry on Wikipedia, I could learn more and in a more orderly way about Christ, than I ever knew before. Haven't you had revelations like this?
The Internet is a meritocracy in which the most credible material rises to the top. To the extent there is "chaff," any reasonably savvy person should develop a knack to recognize this. Learn to adjust to the Internet because there will be no alternative.
Have you ever bought a book because it seemed intriguing and then never got around to reading it? Or, checked out a book from the library and had the same thing happen? A friend of mine in college joked about a book by B.F. Skinner who was "in" with the college crowd of my day: "You bought the book and then a few months later, you see it with the receipt still in it." Books are wonderful in theory but not so helpful in practice.
My generation began hearing about "speed reading." I remember when my high school classmate Brian Henjum was enthused about that. I'm not sure the idea was to consume all the material. How could you read every word? I think it was a cynical strategy to try to ferret out what was relevant in what you were reading. Today we must wonder: why deal with the chaff at all?
Academic types tended to pooh-pooh the Internet in its early days. How futile that is today. So ubiquitous is online-based information today, we don't even hear the term "Internet" so much. It's not an entity, it's everywhere.
Academic people had to adjust by now, haven't they? No more assumptions about how "learned" people most certainly have a stack of books at the ready. As a kid we heard the term "bookworm." I have trouble reading from a book today. I don't have the patience.
What about the virtues of Western civilization? Have they made a comeback? It seems higher education would have treacherous footing without an embrace of traditional values.
My generation was imbued with "burn baby burn." Most of us, in all likelihood, realized this was going to be no beacon guiding us through life. We kept our reservations to ourselves. We knew we'd enter a world where marriage, children, kids and church would become our aims.
College leaders would say they were just "making us think." Their prime rationale was probably to convince us that an alternative set of values was needed to prevent another Vietnam war, and to snuff out racism. Racism is hardly dead.
There is rampant fear about the effects of immigration. We have a president with persistent undertones - sometimes it's not really so "under" - about how the traditional white bread world of our forebears is something to fight to restore.
I wonder how my parents would have turned out, had they been college age in the 1970s with all the self-destructive temptations. I cannot see my father even listening with interest to all the rebellious or counterculture stuff. He had internalized the values of Western civilization. He served in "the good war." What would Vietnam have done to him? Fortunately he escaped all that distress.
And me? I only have the satisfaction of striving to write about it with some degree of accuracy.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com