``...We were all good buddies and did everything together, but when I walked in the back kitchen door to say hi, one of my best friends there looked at me and said, `Why are you here? You just think you're better than us now because you are in school.' That was the last time I have seen any of them...'' Jessica LaBumbard
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The simple answer they were not your friends, they were shits. Real friends would have asked questions about an unknown life and been happy for you. Tough lives and dead end jobs don't breed saints, and it takes a fairly substantial person to face that and be positive and hopeful for others.
An even more difficult thing to deal with comes later as you realize that if you have taken on the cannon of western civilization and manage to incorporate some part of it into your thinking, you have effectively isolated some equivalent part of yourself forever from its native ground. In other words you can never quite return home.
On another thread called something like the use of the humanities which essentially piddled out, it was not mentioned that their ultimate utility should be focused on how to interpret your own time and experience in relation to some part of the greater cannon. That the core or major tonic cord of the humanities is just that. The expression of experience in relation to a history of such experience. That the form of times, their history their composition their larger or more comprehensive relevation are not just hatched out nothing. These are created by the people who live them and this process is accumulative in so far as those who have given it expression have managed to master some part of their respective canons, whether in accord or in revolt. Without that kind of mastery and identification, then these expressions become alienated from this more comprehenive history. Something new might arise from such alienation and loss, but more than likely not.
For example, all these poor or working class republicans are essentially alienated from a much large canon of works that were created in particular for them and from people like them. For example Mark Twain and Stephen Crane.
Or better, the book I just finish this afternoon, `You Can't Win' by Jack Black. Black's autobiography is what happened to all those Huck Finns who didn't get saved and bummed around the West, hitching the rails at the turn of the last century. They ended up as criminals and hung out in wild San Francisco in Chinatown opium parlors, rigged jail houses and other high minded institutions run by corrupt political figures while the street teamed with prostitutes, gamblers, cripples, beggars, bums, and broken down sea men.
These scenes set the stage, the backdrop of the 1920-30s social, labor, and government reform movements. In other words, all those great grand daddies of all that the current corrupt political parties and their filthy rhetoric are devoted to ripping up and throwing away.
Here is excerpt from Black's Harper Magazine June 1929 essay, `What's Wrong with the Right People?'
My own case is typical. Up to the age of fifteen I thought a policeman was a hero, a person to be looked up to and trusted and confided in. Then one evening I was mistakenly `picked up, taken down, and thrown in' by one of them....
I got my first lesson in violence that first night in the jail. For twenty-five years I punished and was punished. I hunted because I was hunted. I showed no consideration for anybody because I expected to receive none. I learned the game of violence thoroughly, from the police, the courts, the prisons. In the end I came to believe that I could survive only by using violence---and using it first.
I know hundreds of reformed criminals and I don't know one who was reformed by a policeman's night-stick, a severe sentence, or prison cruelty. A brutal flogging in a Canadian prison, and, a year after, three days in a strait-jacket on a dungeon floor in California, certainly did nothing to turn my thoughts toward reformation...'' (276p)
Chuck Grimes