Troubled Times for the Graduate: Fearful Future Reflects Punk Past

Choking back a thousand tears, a thousand mortar-boarded seniors will "draw near" the commencement platform today, and officially end the grandeur that was college. One of those thousand tears, however, will not be restrained. I shall weep unashamedly, for I know the future is black. For all of us, the prospects of summer and fall, 1956, have more threat than promise. In several weeks or months, the majority of us will be in one of three forms of inexpressible pain:

1. Walking the hot asphalt of Fifth Avenue, New York or any equivalent thoroughfare, looking for a job;

2. Sighing in exasperation as our frowsily dressed wife presents us, at eventide, with the day's accumulation of bills, opened mail, and sundry matrimonial recriminations;

3. Or fuming with impotent rage as an evil-mannered thug criticizes our carefully polished Army boots during drill.

As we turn from this ghastly vision, the past takes on a new allure. But it is a mirage, similar to the old grad's beery haze, which, as it filters dreams from experience, hides from us, at a most critical period, the realization of life's essential and incessant cruelty.

I am not denying that college for me was a joyride, but its transitory joys only overlaid its bitter reality. Having a car, for instance, provided comfort to, from, and during the battle of the sexes, but my young ladies, since I preferred ladies, surrendered very little, indeed. And the fact that it is a misdemeanor to keep a car in Cambridge adds little to the bliss of the academic life.

Those fabulous nippy football Saturdays, with their Crimson in triumph flashing, usually called to my attention that the girl of my dreams was sitting in the same stadium with someone else.

When the accessibility of 5,000,000 books is pointed out to me, I cannot resist the temptation to multiply this figure by the fifty-cent morning lateness fine which I paid on almost every book I took out. Harvard could be rich that way.

The fast friendships we form during college days will last all our lives, say the speechmakers, but some-how I can hardly forget the moments of friction which to me have epitomized the companionships we'll so fondly remember.

When the milk-and-doughnuts man blows his silly little whistle, piercing my unhappy evening doldrums, all that occurs to me is what sort of refreshment I would vastly prefer to what he has to offer.

And finally, when I am offered advice by my elders, I find myself wondering fearfully whether, if I take it, I will someday be like them.

Don't believe what the old grads tell you, men. They are trying to lure us into their illusory way of thinking, but we must face both sides of the truth: not only is the future bleak; it is hardly more than a bitter echo of the past.