School Daze

--Loitering at the Doors of Perception,
B. Kliban

Maybe this world is another planet's Hell
--Aldous Huxley

As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
--The Times They Are a Changin',
Bob Dylan

Is it that hard to make us look cool?
--Almost Famous (2000)

I'm just trying to be honest
about being a misanthrope
--Dazed and Confused (2003)
_____________________

Knocking around in the far recesses of Ranger's mind is the minor indignity suffered at his alma mater this summer.

While in Bowling Green, Ohio, we decided to contact the school paper just for grins, to volunteer for an interview as the RangerAgainstWar, a Distinguished Military Grad of the BGSU ROTC Program, award-winning Progressive blog writer extraordinaire. Well, the offer went over like a led zeppelin -- the editorial staff had no time for his anti-war stance. What a difference a day makes.

In 1968, the Bowling Green campus was a hotbed of anti-war sentiment, and the ROTC cadets were taunted as ROTZ Nazis. Ranger and his ROTC buddies tried never to wear uniforms to class as we were ridiculed by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) instructors. We would schedule our classes so as to allow an hour before ROTC classes to change into uniform. People would throw trash at us when we would hold our annual review.

Fast-forward to 2011, and the last commencement speaker was a Staff Sergeant E-6 Air Force Active Duty type. Back in June '68 when Ranger was commissioned, Medal of Honor recipient Lew Millet conducted the ceremony, and nobody besides us cadets were even aware of his presence on campus. Now the campus reveres an E-6 AF dude.

How did we get here from there? Why do we not object to our Phony Wars on Terror (PWOTs ©)? Why is a low-ranking enlisted man elevated to commencement speaker and an anti-war advocate ignored? It seems Ranger is out of time, out of place, a stranger in a strange land.

When a formerly liberal college is not even interested in "fair and balanced", we are traversing strange terrain.