KANSAN Comment
Alienating our friends
Photo by Joe Bullard
Marching away from "old" friends
By MIKE SHEARER Arts & Reviews Editor
George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, wrote, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
To a large extent, taking Shaw's artistic overgeneralization into consideration, I have always believed that the reasonable man, in the traditional connotation of the phrase, spends too much time trying to adjust himself to situations which should and could be changed. Oscar Wilde warned that most people die of a "sort of creeping common sense" which is, I believe, somewhat similar to that overly adaptive reasonableness Shaw mentions.
A great portion of my generation is dedicated to making abrupt changes, changes that I usually support with little hesitance. But very recently I've begun to understand a side effect of our determination not to die of that creeping common sense.
I had a talk with a professor, a worried professor. He enjoys teaching and, maybe even more than the actual teaching, enjoys knowing and liking students. He has been teaching for a respectable length of time, but within the past few years, he said, he has detected new "barriers" between himself and some of the students, including some of the type of student to whom he had for years felt closest.
He convinced me that he truly grieved over the new barrier which made him feel uneasy to speak freely in the classroom for fear someone would become hostile and turn off anything else he ever said.
His case is not the one described by Walter Lippman: "As men grow older and take charge of affairs, they must battle a persistent human tendency to see the world through spectacles that fitted them twenty or thirty years earlier. When they are not successful in distinguishing between what they learned when they were young and what reality is coming to be now that they are older, generation gap results." Knowing this professor personally, I am certain that the barrier or gap is not from his own myopia.
I think, rather, that I have been responsible for this barrier. I have been responsible as a member of a generation which, in its enthusiasm to change systems and to change policies has been guilty as the "Easy Rider" Southerners in classifying persons, often of like opinion, at opposite poles.
Don't trust anyone over 30!" say the Yippies—a much—quoted warning.
"I am four years old. We are born twice. My first birth was in 1938, but I was reborn in Berkeley in 1964 in the Free Speech Movement," says Jerry
Rubin. When we say, 'Don't trust anyone over 30,' we're talking about the second birth. I got 26 more years.
"When people 40 years old come up to me and say, 'Well, I guess I can't be a part of your movement,' I say, 'What do you mean? You could have been born yesterday. Age exists in your head.' "
The problem with Jerry's revivalist zeal is that we are not born twice. We're born infinitely more times than that, and rebirth is not necessarily a revocation of your physical age, as if physical age were a sin. The "movement" does not belong to any age group, so there is no reason why a 40-year-old man should revoke his 'first life.' That life surely has something to offer his new-found self.
Jerry Rubin's statements are necessary and in many ways, eloquent. He does recognize certain injustices in American institutions about which most people neither want nor will think. And he sees in justified dissent "the seeds of a new society." But I wonder, and I suppose my professor friend wonders too, if Jerry really thinks those seeds are only within the young, as defined by himself. I might be misinterpreting his ideal of youth, because his ideal seems to me too elitist. Maybe in reality, he believes as I do that every man is reborn many times for many reasons and that the seed of change is in every man—unextinguisherable.
Perhaps Harvard teachers being beaten, Clark Kerr being hit with a pie and other assorted student-faculty incidents around the country're related to the hostilities and the barriers professors are experiencing right here in Kansas. If so, this side effect of a great social force—student power—must be curbed by us students. We have much left to learn, because not only can what we know kill us, but so can what we don't know. It can kill us in many ways. It can kill us while we are trying to breathe life into what we consider dying society.
This does not mean that we should embrace all of our professors and the educational system with which we are involved. There are poor teachers and poor educational traditions, both hindrances to attaining maximum education.
I firmly believe that the teacher-dictator is a relic, an old Edison phonograph which is playing next door to some very fine stereo, full-sound equipment. And educational systems in general are too eager to train persons to fill existing slots in society without taking a galloping pursuit toward supplying society with people who have both the ability and the sense of moral obligation to make changes in that society.
What a great many education critics, particularly students, fail to do is to distinguish noble persons within universities from the old Edison phonographs. This lack of discrepancy has led to what I call a surplus of hostility. This surplus is being thrown in pie pans and it's being carried in fists; it is aggressively negative and its ends will probably prove as profitless as its means.
Yes, Jerry, we must "rise up and abandon the creeping meatball," but we must alienate the fewest number
possible while doing so—not simply because it is good tactics . . . but because "old" professors can be good friends.
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