No frankly, I really don't want to write about this thing, that's why I took so long, but I guess I must. I'm blocking, I know. You see, I attended Northern Illinois University for three years as an undergrad from 1975-77. My old school. Originally the Illinois State Teachers College, the University is located in De Kalb, Il. That's some sixty miles west of Chicago, along the very first section of old Route 66 named after FDR, Roosevelt Road. Get your kicks on.
It was a on a hot August Saturday when I rolled onto campus in my air-cooled black 1963 Volks Wagon Beetle. With the window down and radio blasting, a Salem cigarette hanging from a drinking aged sneer, hair precisely on the collar, and just over the ears. I parked it in the lot by the Johnny W. Holmes student center, pool hall, bowling alley, the tallest structure on campus where it wouldn't get lost. Doin' the varsity drag. Like all matriculating students in those days, I was shown the orientation movie in the Cole lecture hall. I liked it. I could sit down there first, and it was cool and dark inside. Welcome to NIU, you, youyouyou. Later, I studied anthropology and film there. Kool Hall. Tuesday night at the movies: The Last Picture Show.
It was a on a hot August Saturday when I rolled onto campus in my air-cooled black 1963 Volks Wagon Beetle. With the window down and radio blasting, a Salem cigarette hanging from a drinking aged sneer, hair precisely on the collar, and just over the ears. I parked it in the lot by the Johnny W. Holmes student center, pool hall, bowling alley, the tallest structure on campus where it wouldn't get lost. Doin' the varsity drag. Like all matriculating students in those days, I was shown the orientation movie in the Cole lecture hall. I liked it. I could sit down there first, and it was cool and dark inside. Welcome to NIU, you, youyouyou. Later, I studied anthropology and film there. Kool Hall. Tuesday night at the movies: The Last Picture Show.
I remember it was very, very cold the three winters I spent at Northern. And lonely and it was always tempting to run back to the city on Thursday afternoons and avoid the rush. Since Jo was in Nursing School at Evanston Hospital. Unless I had to work delivering pizzas for Rick's Pizza in my '73 Pinto. Weston, Martin and me. The Fugitives. Well, I ran out of money and options in the winter of '77, but not mouths to feed, so and dropped out just 24 credit hours short of a B.S. in Political Science and commenced upon the real life of a family man and prole. I never made it back there. It seems a small loss to me today.
While I seem to lack any sentimental feelings for the institution itself, I deplore this ceaseless gun violence in our U.S. schools and I feel that the pressures on our school-aged children have become a critical mass and must be eased and the best place to start is by somehow making a complete education being on the order of an human necessity, and call it in self-defense, or even better, demand it as the right to free speech, another path to wealth and success. If giving money to political campaigns, as defined by the GOP courts, is another form of speech? than what is higher education, but the mere amassment of political capital, to which, presumably, everyone would then be entitled. Compulsory, but absolutely free to all students.
This in order to rid our education system of this inimical and destructive competition manifesting itself as so may b-western shoot 'em ups on school campuses. O. K. corral outrageous spiraling costs, versus influence donating and legacy and placements. Petit briberies. The peddling of usurious student loans, and trap-door scholarships, and the rest the ever increasing economic fetters which American students and families are currently wearing like Marley's ghost. There are few things that are more important to most parents than their kids' education. This importance they hold in mostly an inverse relationship with their children at some age in point, and as time goes on, the strains can and will begin to tear the relationship apart. At some point this process gets short circuited, usually in high school, and by going through a rebellious phase or something else to bring their common educational values into a more democratic consideration with the parent provider, or else.
Or else you end up with a 27 year old school boy/madman. A subject to all those unresolved adolescent drives, along with an adult's easy access to automatic pistols, shotguns, and ammo, already humping a shitload of anger about being three-hundred fifty thousand dollars in debt and never having held a real job in his entire life. Off with his meds... Another thing I'm sure they could do without is all the neocon frauds in the Political Science department, and they probably would still need more buses. You could never find a spot on a Husky bus when it got really cold, like it has been this year. Ban all cars off campus, too. Conceal and carry? Home rule.
Yes, as long as they're seriously accounted for. Otherwise? Who doesn't feel footloose & fancyfree with a nice Glock 9 under the old overcoat? I mean, what sort of background checks are we using now that would let a troubled kid like this, legally obtain these automatic weapons? Still, the Second Amendment remains a vital source of guidance, once and endlessly adaptable to situations like this and that's where we need to look first, or perhaps, second. Hey! That's something I learned at NIU.
Change is inevitable, but progress requires insight, motive, and direction, and for that all must seek their own enlightenment. Morning comes, evening follows, the seventh day. The snow is general across the Illinois prairie tonight. In the land of Lincoln, six crosses adorn an unimposing low knoll behind an once empty bus stop. Facing it. Looking back across the street towards an endless black western sky, rising above an old hall, a dark, cold and abandoned place, and into a beckoning winter sunset promising peace and eternal rest for us all.
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