A local dance group is devoting an evening to the subject of alcohol,
a dance group whose choreographer is a dance major at the local university...
The theme is illustrated by such questions as (I don't quote precisely)
Are the young controlled by alcohol or do they control alcohol?
Or, why are the young obsessed with alcohol?
Nowhere is there recognition that different nations have different attitudes toward alcohol,
or that this is a Puritan nation.....no sociological awareness of the role that economic matters
play....no appreciation of the basic biology of addictive substances.....No attempt to ask if this is a real problem, or just a mis-perception, a kind of hasty generalization based upon one's personal experience, with no attempt at all to take an external perspective on one's subjective impression.
and I say again< this must reveal something about the education system, and, indeed, the broader culture.... Or might it be that the "problem" is simply that people are socializing, not working, and enjoying themselves? But, you say: they have hang-overs! Yes, that's a problem
but nothing serious. It's excess, an error, not a sin....unless, of course, you assume a Puritan framework, and then, oh then, you are in trouble for revealing your lack of "self-control", your sinfulness.... as opposed to saying: people make mistakes, they mis-calculate; eventually you learn to control your drinking (unless you have a real problem, or maybe if you've lost your job and fallen into despair)....
And, so finally, you wonder what happens at the universities in this country if a university
educated person is so naive....(In fact, it seems as though what's going on is that a person living in an insane Puritan country who has recently acquired the ability to drink alcoholic beverages legally would simply like to celebrate that fact......and talks about the problem of the young as if alcohol abuse were not primarily a problem for the dispirited, the unemployed, those without hope.....and those attributes are not the exclusive property of the young...)
I note in passing that I recently read an essay by Bertolt Brecht in which he emphasized the importance of education for artists, a broad education in culture outside one's specific specialty,
and this pleased me because Brecht seemed to be having a thought I've had many times,
a thought that seems absent locally, even at the local university....
Schizophrenic after-thought:
It is, of course, important to distinguish between the paucity of culture and the sins of individiuals. Individuals in an individualistic culture such as the USA are blind to possibilities which the culture discourages. That is my complaint. I am an individual who has seen other possibilities and is being strangled, starved, suffocated, dehydrated by the cultural desert which exists here in the USA, elpasotexas style. People expect to have bosses because they know no other way, and haven't imagined it either.......People don't see a connection between their lives and the lives of individuals in other continents, etc. You can say "it's not my fault", but it does you no good. You go on living, and struggling, blind to reality....and I feel as though someone had dropped an enormous block of cement on my chest, and while I struggle for my life, I am fully aware of the fact that no one around me can see it......So, what sort of friendship can there be between them and me? I've got an elephant on my back and we pretend it's not there? (Because you are carrying one too)
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