SEX AND STUFF

A Newsweek report (Oct. 4, 2004, p. 44) tells us that “hooking up” is a new campus phenomena. One researcher, Professor Elizabeth Paul, claims “... it’s the campus norm. If you’re a normal college student, you do it.”

Of course, not all the hooking up is actually fornication. Some people just smooch a lot with deep tongue kissing. For others, it’s oral sex and for others, it’s rounding all the bases, a home run, going all the way! That’s what we called “doing the nasty” when I was kid. Professor Paul thinks that as many as 78% of all college students have hooked up by the time graduation rolls around.

Why would this phenomena appear, we ask? One study suggests that college students, because of the pressures of competition, don’t have time for the commitments of full time relationships.

Could something healthy come out of all of this? Allison Caruthers, a Michigan Ph.D student who’s researching “hooking up”, “cites research showing that people who’ve experimented with alcohol or marijuana are often psychologically healthier than people who abstained entirely. She believes there’s a similarity in hookups.”

From my own experience, a once-upon-a-time heavy-drinking, four times married, three times divorced, man, I’d say that experience is worth something. I feel about as free as a person can feel, self-directed nowadays and married by choice finally rather then by the normal obsessive/compulsive drives which used to motivate me. Granted, if you looked back at all the struggle and suffering I put myself and others through, you might agree with those many religious people who turn back quickly to their early religious indoctrination rather than discover the hard-earned ultimate human freedom which is empty of god. They’d say that freedom isn’t worth all the pain; best to turn it all over to their mythology and don’t argue with it. Let me assure you that freedom is precious. . . if you survive the bouncy flight and bumpy landing.


DRAFTING THE BUSH DODGE

In an article about a possible military draft by Jonathan Alter in the Oct. 4, 2004 Newsweek, I came across an interesting comment by the columnist which I think is very true but which conventional wisdom would argue is false:

“One thing we’ve learned about Bush is that he has never taken a position that he knew beforehand would be politically unpopular, including invading Iraq.” (p. 39)

By the way, Newsweek, in Alter’s article, was nearly a week ahead of our local paper, the Spokesman Review, in reporting the threats to our soldiers that they’d better reenlist or face being sent to Iraq. Look, I think there should be a draft with nothing but medical and age deferments allowed. Unless, we put our children and their fathers on the line, we never get to face just how important the cause is. It’s so easy for cowboys like George to send off a few of our fathers, mothers and children to war if most of us have nothing at stake. It’s so easy to pay lip service in support of a president’s bullheadedness if we have nothing to lose personally. That’s always been the weakness in an all-volunteer army, that we have no stake in their deployment.


EXISTENTIALISM FROM DOSTOEVSKY TO SARTRE

I never did finish this book, and this is why:

I do feel that I live in a different world than these ancient philosophers. . Most of their problems are not my problems. Their way of approaching reality is not my way. They seem, and I mean no disrespect, from a far distant time, almost as if their consciousness is of another species. As they try to divide the world into categories for discussion, I see errors and falsehoods in their simplest statements. For example, by Ortega: “The stone is given its existence. . . [man] has to make his own existence.” (p. 153)

What the hell does that mean? Who gives the stone its existence? How simply insufficient for modern men are generalized statement like Ortega’s! So much changes for us when we fully accept the possibility that we are almost robotic in most of our functions and thoughts. All the terms for discussion alter.
___________________________________________________

"A narcissist is someone better looking than you are." —Gore Vidal