POST SCRIPT TO SEEKER!'s latest post

John O'Brien (JOBRIEN@UCS.INDIANA.EDU)
Thu, 2 Jun 1994 23:24:49 EST

Seeker1
Choice of weapons would lie with the challanger . . . expenses
incurred by institutions over the combat would be born by the
challanged.

Post Script to my earlier not on why I care . . .
My friend, I am 52 and began my career as a low level clerk/programmer
with the Navy Dept. under Jack Kennedy . . . my first wife was in fact
connected secondarily to the family . . . and my political values were
firmly fixed on EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY, INCLUSION OF THE DISENFRANCHISHED,
ELIMINATION OF POVERTY, AND PROSPERITY FOR ALL as well as the basics of
Jeffersonian Democracy.
It make me ill, literally, to have watched those values distorted over
twenty years . . . through the assasination of political leadership, the
intentional deindustrialization of the United States, the intentional
splitting and pitting of one special interest group against another . . .
and the continued infringement of the constition of the United States.
Post-modernism bothers me because it posits meaninglessness; if you love
despair you'll love post-modernist theory (and because it offers nothing
in return, after a deconstruction).
I am pragmatist enough to know that academia is no shining light of
moral principle . . . but idealist enough to refuse to stop trying to make
it what it should be.
In other words, my friend . . . things are not right as they are, and
it needs to be said. If you don't think so, remember the next time you
have to foot a tuition bill that my first semester in college in 1959 was
free (a tax and land grant supported state school that worked on the
principle that anyone [male, female, minority, handicapped or whatever]
who graduated from an Ohio High School with a legitimate GPA and a
penchant for thinking was entitled to try to obtain a college degree. The
powers that be in those days knew that it was good for the State to have
education and literacy. Deconstruct that the next time you pay out
1,800.oo of your own dollars to be taught by people who you obviously
know are not the best quality . . . for one term.
Madness seeker1 . . . a society in which it is ok for people to
die on the streets from homelessness, but a crime to have a cigarette!
If you happen to be religious . . . go for revelations.

John