Dinosaurs and Asteroids

by William H. Benson

July 17, 2014

     In March of 1992, three astronomers, Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy discovered their ninth comet, hence its name, “Shoemaker-Levy 9.” The team determined that S-L9 was orbiting Jupiter now rather than the sun. Because Jupiter is a heavy-weight planet, exerting an enormous gravitational pull, astronomers call it the solar system’s vacuum sweeper.

     In July of 1992, astronomers noticed that Jupiter’s force had broken S-L9 into 23 fragments that they labelled A through W and that each were strung out in single file, like pearls on a string. Most fragments, they estimated, were little more than two kilometers wide.

     Astronomers detected that the comet was losing its power, unable to overcome Jupiter’s massive pull, and they calculated the fragments would strike the massive planet the second week of July in 1994, twenty years ago. That week astronomers trained their telescopes, plus the Hubble space telescope, at Jupiter, in anticipation of the spectacular fireworks, and they were not disappointed.

     The first fragment struck on July 16, and the last on July 21. Brown smudges and stains dotted Jupiter’s surface, some thousands of kilometers wide, as big as Earth itself, or bigger.

     Astronomers estimated that fragment G was the heaviest and largest, three or four kilometers wide, and its impact created a brown smudge double the diameter of Earth’s. “Although only about the size of a small mountain, it created wounds in Jupiter’s surface the size of Earth,” one author wrote.

     As the weeks passed, the stains dissipated, but astronomers were convinced. A collision with a single comet would cause immense catastrophes upon Earth, where life exists.

     In 1980, Luis Alvarez, a physicist, and his son, Walter, a geologist, published a paper, and in it they proposed that an extra-terrestrial source, such as a comet or an asteroid, had slammed into the Earth millions of years ago, and that it had caused fires, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis.

     With debris and smoke littering the atmosphere for years, a continual winter settled upon planet Earth. Without adequate sunlight, photosynthesis was disrupted, and once the plants died out, so did the herbivores. Then, those atop the food chain, such as the carnivores like Tyrannosaurus Rex, were wiped out. A single comet pushed the dinosaurs into extinction in a few thousand years. 

     Walter and Luis had noticed a thin clay layer in sedimentary deposits all over the planet and that this layer is unusual because it contained soot, glass, quartz, and diamonds, minerals formed by high temperatures and pressure. They also noted that the clay layer is rich in iridium, a mineral not abundant on Earth, but one that is found in comets and asteroids.

     They also observed that the dinosaur fossils reside below the clay layer, but not above it.

     The Alvarez’s proposal encountered fierce opposition and debate, but two years after Luis Alvarez died of cancer in 1988, researchers pointed to the crater Chicxulub, 120 miles wide and under the water off the coast of Mexico. The comet that caused that crater, scientists believe, triggered the dinosaurs’ mass extinctions, and as much as 75% of the pre-existing plant and animal life.

     In his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson said that if a similar comet would strike the Earth, temperatures “would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the Sun’s surface. Everything in its path—people, houses, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame.”

     As if not bad enough, “the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles would be killed by the blast. Everything standing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead.”

     Afterwords, volcanoes would erupt, tsunamis would roil the oceans, and “a cloud of blackness”  would cover the planet, ushering in an apocalyptic nightmare.

     What life forms would survive another collision with a comet? Possibly those that survived before: carrion-eaters, sharks, crocodiles, bacteria, certain insects, some plants, a few small mammals. The primates, if not destroyed, would be changed forever,and this includes human beings, men and women.

     All of this is sobering. Human beings reside atop the food chain now, as T-Rex once did, and yet a single rock floating in outer space has the potential to destroy all that humanity has accumulated over several millennium: science, the historical record, the legal code, literary achievements, technology, buildings, military armaments, and systems of government.

     We would have little warning, just a few months or weeks if someone saw it approaching, or as little as a single second after it entered the Earth’s atmosphere and heated up. If we did see it weeks in advance, we could do nothing to prevent it from striking Earth, because we have no technology to redirect a comet’s trajectory, nor to launch a nuclear warhead to pulverize it.

     The odds are against an imminent collision though. Brian Witzke, a geologist in Iowa, said that a collision with a comet or an asteroid or a massive meteorite occurs only “about once every million years on average.”

The Puritan Ethic and the American Revolution

by William H. Benson

July 3, 2014

     Joseph J. Ellis says in his book, Founding Brothers, “No event in American history, which was so improbable at the time, has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution.” In other words, Ellis contends that the revolution was not foreordained to happen. In 1760, few English-speaking people, either in England or in its thirteen colonies, believed in the likelihood of an American rebellion against King George III and Parliament. Few, if any, foresaw its approach.

     According to Ellis, “the creation of a separate American nation occurred,” not “gradually, but suddenly,” not in an “evolutionary fashion, but in a revolutionary way,” and in a moment of “dynamic intensity and inspiration.” It was like a whirlwind that swept across the land in an hour on a calm day.

     Why did it happen when it did? Why would the thirteen American colonies unite in their opposition to the British government’s officials in London when they had rarely united before to achieve anything?

     Perspective is important. How one person sees a situation can be so different from another, and not everyone reacts in a similar way. Internal beliefs, principles, and ideas, as well as exterior fears, threats, and intimidation, can drive a person one way, but another person reacts in a contrary direction.

     The king, Parliament, and British officials failed to foresee the Americans’ reaction to the stamp tax of 1765. Those in London believed that a small, almost insignificant, tax—by the purchase of a stamp required on legal documents and playing cards—would offset the expense of quartering British soldiers in the colonies, but the colonists thought otherwise.

     They argued that they paid their taxes to their respective colony—to Virginia, to Massachusetts, or to the other colonies—and so they refused to pay this tax to London by purchasing the detested stamps, but the reason for their hostility goes beyond simple opposition to a tax. 

     Edmund Morgan, a twentieth-century historian, thought deeply about the revolution, and he identified its prime cause in what he called the Puritan Ethic. Although the American Revolution’s leaders were not Puritans, they subscribed to the same ethics. The Puritans championed above all else industry and frugality, virtues that promoted manufacturing and economic self-sufficiency.

     Many colonists came to believe that those in England had abandoned hard-work and thrift and had fallen into the vices of laziness, prodigal spending, and an opulent lifestyle. The colonists especially detested the office-holders in London, men “who served no useful purpose but were fattened on the labors of those who did the country’s work.”

     Samuel Adams said the commissioners were “a useless and very expensive set of officers.”

     Edmund Morgan wrote that visitors to London would return and then “make unflattering comparisons between the simplicity, frugality, and industry that prevailed in the colonies and the extravagance, luxury, idleness, drunkenness, poverty, and crime that they saw in the mother country.”

     The Americans believed that the colonists worked and spent their money wisely, but those in England were lazy and, like fools, spent all they earned. American writers protested the “legions of idle, lazy, and to say no worse, altogether useless customs house locusts, caterpillars, flies, and lice.”

     The colonists thought that the Stamp Act was London’s attempt to bring its corruption across the Atlantic to the thirteen colonies. Thomas Jefferson wrote on February 20, 1775, “We do not mean that our people shall be burdened with oppressive taxes to provide sinecures for the idle or the wicked.”

     Why were the virtues of industry and frugality so important to the colonists? Edmund Morgan answered that the colonists believed that virtue promoted both property and liberty. By the virtues of diligent work and the wise use of resources, people could purchase property, the very foundation of liberty. Without property ownership, citizens are reduced to slaves, but with it, citizens are liberated.

     In the newspaper, the Newport Mercury, dated February 28, 1774, a writer wrote, “We may talk and boast of liberty; but after all, only the industrious and frugal will be free.”

     The colonists feared the same would happen in the colonies that had happened in the British Isles. Rent and taxes had drained the Irish farmers, reduced them to serfs, to the status of slaves bound to the land, without the liberty to leave or to advance themselves. The American Revolution’s leaders were determined to prevent that from ever happening to the colonists.

     The American Revolution was not an inevitable but an improbable possibility. Once that whirlwind began spinning though, its leaders were committed. Jefferson’s final words in the Declaration of Independence are most illuminating. “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor,” because at stake were virtue, property, and liberty.

     So, enjoy and celebrate Independence Day.

President Obama and Chief Sitting Bull

by William H. Benson

June 19, 2014

     Next week some five hundred visitors will convene at the Real Bird Ranch, adjacent to the Little Bighorn Battle site, near Hardin, Montana, to watch the 21^st Annual Battle of the Little Bighorn Re-enactment. For four days men will dress in cavalry soldier uniforms and ride their horses in the 7^th U.S. Cavalry, under the command of Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer, played by Steve Alexander of Monroe, Michigan.

     Also, young Indians from the Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapahoe tribes will “wear breechcloths and moccasins, and paint themselves and their horses with symbols of red, white, yellow, and black.” Last year, Frank Knows His Gun, an Oglala Sioux, played the part of Crazy Horse.

     Someone will play the part of Chief Sitting Bull, a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux, who was also in the camp in June of 1876, but did not participate in the actual fight.

     Chief Sitting Bull had resisted the U.S. government’s efforts to confine the Sioux tribes to reservations. After the loss of the Black Hills to gold miners, the Sioux, along with the Northern Cheyennes and the Arapahoes, felt betrayed, and so they slipped away from their reservations and congregated in southwestern Montana, along the banks of the Little Bighorn River.

     Once, during a Sun Dance, Sitting Bull experienced a vision and saw soldiers falling into the Lakota camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky. “The Great Spirit has given our enemies to us,” he said. “We are to destroy them. We do not know who they are. They may be soldiers.”

     Because Custer refused to believe his scouts’ reports that more than 10,000 natives were gathered at the Little Bighorn, he attacked and was annihilated, along with 267 cavalry soldiers on June 25, 1867.

     In a fury, the federal government responded with a massive military force to drive the rebellious natives back to their reservations, and most complied, except for Sitting Bull who escaped to Canada’s Northwest Territories. After four years of hunger and desperation, he returned to his native lands and settled at the Standing Rock Sioux reservation that straddles both North and South Dakota.

     Last week, on Friday the thirteen, President Obama and Michelle landed in Cannon Ball, North Dakota and visited the Standing Rock reservation. This was the first president to ever visit Standing Rock, and only the fourth president to visit any Native American reservation. Only Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton had done the same. Barack and Michelle met children at Cannon Ball’s elementary school, and they attended the powwow celebrating Cannon Ball’s Flag Day.

     When the president spoke, he quoted from Standing Rock’s most famous former resident, Sitting Bull, who said, “Let’s put our minds together to see what we can build for our children.”

     The president offered hope to the children he met, but life for Standing Rock’s children is grim. Unemployment stands at 79%, creating a poverty that stuns every visitor. Domestic violence, suicide, diabetes, infant mortality, and heart disease are rampant, and most of these negatives stem from chronic alcoholism. The reservation has become a “breeding ground of sorrow,” dependent upon government assistance. Someone said that on the reservation, “the dominant culture is welfare, not Sioux.” 

     The two casinos on the Standing Rock reservation have pumped some money into the local economy but created few jobs, mainly “because they are too isolated from potential customers,” many miles away from the high population urban centers.

     As a result of the broken conditions, the reservations’ schools struggle. A commentator said that the Bureau of Indian Education schools “perform worse than every major public school system other than Detroit’s schools, and the Native Americans have the highest dropout rates in the country.”

     Christopher Bordeaux, a South Dakota director of the tribal schools, said, “The bureau really has no idea what tribal schools are all about, and they have not taken the time to ever listen and learn how to help us, and then they turn around and point to us and say the schools are failing.”

     No small wonder it is that Sitting Bull resisted the reservation. His vision of what lay in store for his tribe included confinement, a scarcity of buffalo, and dependence upon untrustworthy white men for their food, clothing, and shelter. He was right.

     What can anyone do to improve life for those on the reservation?

     One surprising answer is a grassroots organization called White Bison, Inc., a non-profit that provides Wellbriety programs to the Native Americans, “mending their broken hearts,” ending the shame and guilt that alcoholics feel, and going “beyond sobriety and recovery to a life of wellness and healing everyday.” A solution may originate from within the tribes themselves.

     In his speech, the president said, “Michelle and I grew up feeling like we were on the outside looking in. But thanks to family and friends, and teachers and coaches and neighbors who didn’t give up on us, we didn’t give up on ourselves. If we’re working together, we can make things better.”  

Lance Armstrong vs. Floyd Landis

by William H. Benson

June 5, 2014

     Floyd Landis rode his bicycle for the United States Postal Team for three years, from 2002-2004, alongside his teammate, Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France each of those years. Floyd admits now that during those three years, he cowered to Lance. It was known that “Lance called the shots on the team,” and “what Lance said went.” “He ran his team like a high-powered corporation.”

     Lance wanted to win big, and he did so by doping himself and his teammates. In 1995, Lance had lost a race, and afterwords he told his teammates, “I’m getting kicked and we’ve got to do something about it. We need to get on a program.” He hired Dr. Michele Ferrari, a doping expert, who began to administer synthetic erythropoietin (EPO), a drug that stimulates red blood cell production and can “inflate an athlete’s aerobic capacity by 8 percent.”

     In addition, Ferrari prescribed testosterone, cortisone, and blood transfusions to boost oxygen levels.

“The doping regimen was as rigorous as any training or nutrition plan,” and those with a conscience, those who refused to cooperate, Lance cut from the team, saying that “they were not a team player.”

     When winning his seven Tour de France races between 1999 and 2005, Lance displayed a ruthless disregard for others. One enemy he made said, “He treats people like bananas. He takes what he needs, then just tosses the peel on the side of the road.” Girlfriends, his wife, teammates, and a series of cyclists he cast aside, one after another, without a hesitant thought. His discard pile stands tall.

     In 2005, Floyd Landis chose to ride with another team, Phonak, after he was offered a better contract. During the Tour de France that year, a feud broke out between Landis and Armstrong, who were heard shouting at each other. Armstrong won the race and then retired from competitive racing.

     In 2006, without Armstrong to compete against, Landis won the Tour de France, but then he tested positive for synthetic testosterone, and authorities stripped him of the title and banned him from racing for two years. Landis felt devastated and confused. Why was he punished but not Lance Armstrong, who had cheated and won seven years in a row? 

     On June 10, 2010, four years ago, Floyd Landis blew the whistle. He filed a lawsuit against Armstrong, and provided testimony to the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) of the extent of Armstrong’s doping. Two years later the Department of Justice filed a second lawsuit against Armstrong, demanding a refund of the $41 million that the Postal Service paid to sponsor his team. If successful in its lawsuit, the federal government could collect treble damages, over $120 million.

     When it was known that Floyd Landis stood to receive up to thirty percent of the government’s proceeds because of his role as the whistle-blower, Armstrong said, “This news that Floyd Landis is in this for the money reconfirms everything we all knew about Landis. By his own admission, he is a serious liar, an epic cheater, and a swindler who raised a million dollars from his loyal fans based on his lies.” By then, Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis were bitter enemies.

     Then, the tide turned. Landis’s testimony and the government’s investigation overwhelmed Lance Armstrong and his supporters. After years of doping, lies to cover it up, bullying his teammates, and threatening retaliation to all those who dared accuse him of drug use, Lance Armstrong announced on August 23, 2012, that he would surrender his fight with the USADA.

     “There comes a point in every man’s life when he has to say ‘Enough is enough.’ For me that time is now.” The next day the USADA announced that they would strip Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles and ban him from cycling for life.

     Travis Tygart, chief executive of USADA, said, “The evidence shows beyond doubt that the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team ran the most sophisticated, professionalized, and successful doping program that the sport had ever seen.” Lance’s corporate sponsors fired him.

     In January 2013, Lance appeared on Oprah Winfrey and confessed the truth. “I am deeply flawed, and I’m paying the price for it, and I think that’s okay. I deserve this.” He said that he did so because of a “ruthless desire to win, that the level that it went to, for whatever reason, is a flaw.”

     The two law suits are ongoing, but Lance has settled other lawsuits out of court. He may negotiate. 

     Floyd Landis is from Farmersville, Pennsylvania, was born on October 14, 1975, stands 5 feet 10 inches, and weighs 150 pounds. Lance Armstrong is from Plano, Texas, was born on September 18, 1971, stands 5 feet 9 ½ inches tall, and weighs 165 pounds. Other than the fact that one is from the North and the other is from the South, the two men share much in common. Both love to race bicycles.

      Too often in this life, justice is a fantasy. The innocent are jailed, the guilty are voted innocent, and if the truth comes out, it is too late to make a difference or restore a reputation. What can we take from the the Armstrong-Landis feud? In Floyd Landis, Lance Armstrong made one too many enemies.

Nigeria’s Schoolgirls

by William H. Benson

May 22, 2014

     A caveman lives in a cave, carries a wooden club with a stone head, dresses in animal skins, pats his pet dinosaur, and then drags women around by their hair. This stereotype originated in the comics. There is Alley Oop, who carried a mean-looking war club, lived in the kingdom of Moo, had a pretty girlfriend named Oola and a pet dinosaur named Dinny. Then, there is Fred and Wilma Flintstone, Barney and Betty Rubble, Pebbles, Bam-Bam, and Dino, Fred and Wilma’s dinosaur.

     Comics devoted to prehistoric people who dwell in a cave might offer slight entertainment, but a cave is dark, dirty, more appropriate for animals than human beings. Western Civilization asked people to leave the cave, where they existed in a state of ignorance and depravity, and enjoy the daylight, where they could build clean homes without snakes and spiders.

     Yet, for some, this desire to push women back into the cave remains. Weeks ago, Abubakar Shekau, the leader of a pro-Islamic terrorist organization named Boko Haram—which means “Western education is forbidden,”—kidnapped hundreds of girls at a boarding school in Chibok, in northeast Nigeria, and is now holding them in the dense Sambisa forest and in caves in the Gwoza Mountains.

     A video released last week showed that the girls now wear veils and pray. One would presume that they are now enduring the worst forms of brutality deep inside those miserable caves. Instead of chalk, chalkboards, books, lectures, assignments, and tests, the girls are commanded to pray, prepare food for their captors, and suffer physical degradation and abuse. 

     In exchange for the girls’ release, Shekau is demanding the release of 4,000 Boko Haram prisoners that the Nigerian government has captured in recent months. If Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, refuses, then Shekau threatens to sell the kidnapped girls as slaves to men in Chad and Cameroon. Shekau says, “There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell.”

     The fault line between Islamic and non-Islamic Africa runs through northeast Nigeria, and a war is the result. In the past two years Boko Haram has killed some 7,000 people and captured hundreds, but Goodluck Jonathan’s government appears unwilling to crush them for good.

     Yet, his army knows the location where Boko Haram is holding the girls. A reporter name Peregrino Brimah of the Daily Post said that the army, as well as the girls’ relatives, followed the captors up to “the periphery of the camp,” but when the family members urged the army to attack and “rescue the girls, the commanders said they had no orders to do so.”

     Disappointed by the soldiers’ timidity, these civilians stared and saw that the captors had “generators running refrigerators and other equipment, as well as hundreds of motorcycles.” Now that is surprising. Because of Western Civilization’s educational system, those brutal kidnappers enjoy modern-day conveniences, such as gasoline, refrigeration, and motorcycles, but not the captured girls, who are relegated to caves, insulted, sold into slavery, and no doubt drug around by their hair.

     Is it not incongruous to use and enjoy Western Civilization’s inventions, but then want to rip apart the very social, political, and economic fabric that gave rise to their creation? If they want to forbid Western education for others, then they should deny themselves its benefits.  

     In The New York Times, the columnist Nicholas Kristof stated the facts: “In northeastern Nigeria, education is weak, women are marginalized, 2/3’s have no formal education, 1 in 20 has completed high school, and half are married by age 15.”

     Kristof then asked, “What’s so scary about smart girls?” He answered, “There’s no force more powerful to transform a society. If you want to mire a nation in backwardness, manacle your daughters.” Or, I say, shove them into the back corner of a cave.

     Why is this? Kristof argues that once educated, girls postpone marriage, and when they do marry, they tend to give birth to fewer children. This changes a nation’s demography. Where a disproportionate number of boys and young men roam the country, without families or work, political instability is rife.

     Then, in those nations where schools educate their girls and then give them access to worthwhile jobs, such as in Oman and Bangladesh, the birthrate declines, the youth bulge disappears, and stability reigns. Kristof says, “Educate a girl and transform a society.”

     Islamic terrorism will not disappear on its own. One Nigerian complained that the Islamists “bomb our cities, kill our people, spoil our glory, dim our star, and [take] our children. Boko Haram has shown the world that we are a nation of cowards.” While the Nigerian government dithers, the girls sit in their caves, praying, one would think, for their release.

University Graduation

by William H. Benson

May 8, 2014

     On Tuesday, April Fools’ Day, several dozen Dartmouth students gathered in the office belonging to the university’s president, Philip J. Hanlon, and insisted that he respond to each of the items listed on their Freedom Budget. The students demanded a faculty that included more women and minorities, gender-neutral housing and restrooms, and harsher penalties for sexual assaults.

     In their Freedom Budget, they wrote, “We seek to eradicate the systems of oppression” that exist on the Dartmouth campus. These systems include “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and ableism,” and are “deployed at Dartmouth as forms of institutional violence.” Someone pointed out that these were “broad and somewhat inconsistent demands,” as if several action groups had joined in this sit-in.

    President Hanlon responded with a campus-wide email. “Academic communities rest on a foundation of collaboration and open dialogue informed by respectful debate among multiple voices.” A Dartmouth spokesperson explained to the students that the president raises funds for the university, but others address student concerns. Nonetheless, the students spent the night in the president’s office.

     Linda Chavez, the syndicated columnist, said last week that Hanlon wants to focus his attention on “the campus fraternity system, and his solution—a committee to look into ‘high-risk drinking, sexual assault and inclusivity.’”

     Chavez suggests alternatives: expel all underage students tested with “a blood alcohol level of .05,” and expel those who buy alcohol for minors. “As for the assault,” she writes, “stop the drinking, and there will be fewer sexual assaults,” because drinking and assaults run in tandem. She suggests that student orientation should include “some time exploring the negative consequences of hooking up.”

     Her suggestions resonate with wisdom, but where is the willpower and the leadership on a campus?

     Chavez then makes a perceptive comment: “The promiscuous culture rampant on university campuses leads to a coarser atmosphere and diminished happiness.”

     Really? Has American culture arrived at the same point that Socrates argued 2,500 years ago, that “knowledge of the good,” and acting in the moral and virtuous way, would lead to feelings of inner worth and happiness? He contended that if people wish to harmonize their souls and produce a divine-like state of inner tranquility, then they must exercise control over their inner desires.

     Despite his good heart and his wisdom, the authorities insisted that Socrates drink—not alcohol—but hemlock, the poison that ended his life.

     Last week in the New York Times Book Review there appeared a review of William D. Cohan’s new book, The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of our Great Universities. Cohan argues that the scandal resulted from two programs that Duke instituted in the 1980’s: “import expensive academic talent,” and “pour a deep river of cash into the athletic program.” Cohan points out that no one understood then that the two were “on a crash course.”

     To their athletes, Duke’s coaches passed out hundreds of dollars, supposedly for their meals, but the athletes in turn scorned academic studies, were “openly hostile” to intellectual discourse, and turned to “booze, gambling, and the hiring of desperately poor women for entertainment.” The lacrosse team members were the worst offenders.  

     A high school graduate can find reasons to avoid the university: the cost, the extensive promiscuity, the binge drinking, and a liberal philosophy that condones and blesses every idea or action imaginable.

     But a student can name some good reasons to attend: Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Einstein, the periodic table of elements, anatomy, botany, language study, business, and music. Each area of study outweighs all the negatives.

     As for the cost, consider Ben Franklin’s quote, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

     Graduation exercises begin this weekend, and the fortunate ones, the happy ones, will graduate. They found within themselves the courage to shove aside for a few hours everyday the junk—the trashy ideas, the immoral behavior, the pursuit of perpetual intoxication, and the excessive emphasis upon sports—and concentrate on their textbooks, their notes, their term papers, and their examinations.

     A diploma indicates a laser-like focus, determination, willpower, and un-swervability. “The coarser atmosphere” and its “diminished happiness” failed to lure them permanently into its trap, and so this weekend they are well-pleased. Instead of a sit-in, they will walk across a stage and receive a diploma.