Still More School Stuff

When I had to sign off yesterday I was just about to tell you some more about the Creative Writing Club. I don't remember who was in it, but it wasn't more than a half dozen people. I don't remember the teacher who ran it, but I don't think it was Mrs. Kew. I thought I would like it at first, but it got old real quick. We were doing poetry, but not the regular poetry that rhymes. I never could see the point of that kind of poetry. I mean, if it's not going to rhyme, then why not just make it prose? My interest in school activities was pretty well burned out by the end of my freshman year. I did stick with the ROTC though, even though some of it was done on my own time. By my senior year, I was tired of that too and I disengaged myself from all the extra stuff. By then my mind was already in Alaska, and it was just waiting for my body to catch up with it. I remember all that school spirit stuff too, but only in my freshman year. Maybe it was still going on after that but I wasn't paying attention to it.

You know, I don't remember the teachers trying to get us to all think the same way but, looking back on it now, I suppose they were. Since then I have read some stuff about how the youth culture began to displace the adult culture back in the 60s. If that was true, I'm sure that the teachers were trying to oppose it. I never was conscious of a youth culture in those days, or an adult culture either for that matter. My mother was always talking about "society" but, since she was a big opera fan, I figured that culture and society consisted of people who dressed up in fancy clothes and went to the opera. I certainly didn't want anything to do with that!

Decades later I did become a bit of an opera fan myself when they started showing it on television with English subtitles, but I usually watched that in my bathrobe with a beer in my hand. I don't think that's what my mother had in mind when she encouraged me to expose myself to culture. Nevertheless, she was pleased when I showed her some of my favorite operas on VCR tape. She had some serious health problems by then and couldn't get around much, so she hadn't been to the opera in a long time. She also had difficulty sitting still for long periods of time, so she seldom watched the operas on TV because she didn't have the endurance to sit through a whole one. When I showed her how you could stop the tape anytime you wanted to and come back to it later without missing anything she was really happy about that.

What you said about that guy working in the commie factory makes a lot of sense. Maybe that was one of the big weaknesses of communism. An organization that will not tolerate criticism can never improve itself, or an individual person either for that matter. I don't care how good you are, or think you are, there is always room for improvement. Besides that, conditions around you are always changing, and you need to respond to that in some manner. Maybe you go along with the change or maybe you oppose it but, either way, you can't keep doing the same thing over and over again whether it works or not.