Understanding American Enthusiasms

It was the radical sixties – college days – and some of us were stuck in the middle of Ohio. There was no trekking off to San Francisco with flowers in our hair – whoever had a car could get us to dull, nearby Newark, for near beer or, as a treat, it was off to Columbus, at least an hour away. That would have to do. We were in Granville – not the center of the hypothetical revolution – at a quite good liberal arts college, but it was mostly filled with frat boys and young ladies with stiff hair and a circle pin on that white Oxford-cloth blouse. Those rebels who challenged convention – and the would-be intellectuals – were few, and had to stick together. 

 

And the farms stretched out from the edge of campus forever, or so it seemed. So there we were, in what they call the formative years, trying to figure out all of life and where we fit – and what we could change, and what we couldn’t. We were young Americans in the heart of America. What we saw around us on campus was those who would become conservative Republican businessmen, dentists and doctors. They would settle down and raise families, and do what they did in the Ozzie and Harriet lives – fine, they seemed happy enough with that. But they wouldn’t be reading Hunter Thompson or Marx, or joining communes, or eating tofu, or hitchhiking through Greece, or taking to the streets to change end the war and change things. In the middle of Ohio there were only a few such folks, soon gone – and they were the ones who thought they saw things as there were in United States.

 

The few were the idealists, full of their readings of American history and psychology and philosophy, who wanted to make things better, somehow. The many were those who thought things were just fine. What was the problem? They thought we were crazy. Maybe we were.

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