North Dakota State University - Bison Yearbook (Fargo, ND)

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Night after Night I lie like this listening. Night after night I can not sleep. . . . I wake knowing something thinking something has happenedi: It was anxiety A newly appointed annual editor unable to find or think of an idea for his forthcoming yearbook browsed through past yearbooks and decided to make his yearbook a replica of the 1947 yearbook. The easy way out. Instructors sit up in an English office. Every once in a while they decide to give spelling tests to stu' dents who really shouldnt need them, constantly they mark up papers with red marks. They rare' ly think of changing the English languageg they would rather give their spelling tests, for this is the easy way out. a grain of wheat, a hungry mouth, a shot heard round the world . , . a broken glass, a prison wall, a loaf of bread, a hasty hand, fiArchibald Macleish. THE HAMLET OF ARCHIBALD MACLEISH. Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, and Archibald MacLeish . . . in the novels of Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and john Dos Passos . . . anxiety everyvvhere. .. anxiety over man and his future tension over wars fears of science And what was mankindls answer to this anxiety? It had none. A11 was distorted. Everywhere a profuf sion of confusion. Civilization was as convulsing and discordant as its music. Instead of finding 'lnewv solutions and blazing new paths, man looked for a solution to his prob- lems in the past. He sought a panacea in yellowing history books. The result was catastrophic. Simple mistakes of the past became compounded in the pres' ent and were expanding infinitely into the future. It was all a manifestation of Mthe easy way out . From the lowest drunk on the street to the highest echelons man was seeking the easy way out. When man could not solve a controversy by diplomatic means, he resorted to the easy way out: he spent bilf lions and trillions for military arms: it was so much easier to club a man on the head than convince him. Nor was this man's only ailment. Self satisfaction saturated the lands. Propagandists chanted the big lie: This is the greatest that there has ever been or that there will ever be . The priests of politics exf tolled their Gods as the best'l. And the people high and low fell-forgetting that there is no best or ever will be . . . forgetting that man can never reach infinf ity . . . WE can Always go further and farther and better-this law, man has forgotten. Into history man has gone to find the answers, but he is oblivious of the mistakes that have led him to the canyon. Here and there he pulls answers that nnghthavebemaconect2OO5mnrsago,butnottoday. Where and how did man reach the chasm: 1951? Did it start the day that Spanish ships sailed the seas, or when Luther nailed a paper on a door in Wit- tenberg? Confucius, Christ, Calvin, Gutenberg, Shakespeare, Elizabeth, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Peter and Catherine, Stalin and Churchill and Gandhi, Einstein? the 186th day of a leap year, the Cctober revolution, 476, ' 1066, 7

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Ai ' 'fl , ,, . 'l J Q .- I donlt understand it I donlt understand it bewilderment, tension anxiety.. . . . bewilderment, tension, anxiety . . . boys, young men, draft, camps, commands, obedience or guard' house, obedience or guardhouse, march, left and right, why not middle, why not middle, why not middle . . . right and left, conservaf tive or radical, republican or demo' crat, houses, umt, military, obsolf ete military, undemocratic military, obey, obey, do not think, obey, life, liberty, and the pursuit . . . awol . . . left, left, communists, Negroes, kill the dirty nigger, ku lqlux klan, kill, outlaw the communists, outf law, obey, obey, obey, obey . . . 6 Naive statement that, for this is the story of some nineteen hundred students and the world in which they lived. A complex story, a pictorial, in which there are no heroes and no villains. A drama in which the understudies quickly become the principals and then, too, disappear in the miasma of time. A story of a world within a world. The time is now and yet it is yesterday. Yesterday , . . Qctober, 1950. A painting entitled Bird in Flight stands in a library lobby, The paintf ing is characterized by long green and red strokes, but no bird can be seen in the painting. On the second floor of that library stand other paintings in an exf hibit of modern painting. Strange pictures with sim- ple names: Laboratory Reportll, Battlewagon'l, and Subway.M 4 Passers passfby. They look at the paintings, read the titles, and stand perplexed. Vague expressions and blank faces. Remarks: L'Silly, isnlt it? , Alt looks just like a subway , LkMy seven year old daughter can do better than that , and ml don't understand it. Conf torted faces, silly grins, and knowing smiles . . . be- wilderment, furrowed bewilderment, tenseness, tenf sion, and anxiety. Without knowing it, SC students and others were looking at themselves, at their civilization, and their society. Distorted picture it Awas, but the distortion was not in the mirror-it was in the civilization. Art is a barometer-a graph of its culture. ln the years 1950551 the graph was eccentric, zig-zagged, unbalf anced, and wayward. The barometric needle told its story. A Told of war and atom bombs and bacteriological warfare . . . of hatred and cruelty and of selfishness . . partiality, prejudice, inequality . . . gullibility and peof ple . . . dead men, bugle blares, battles tracks, hos- pitals, doctors, nurses, plasma, united states, factories, tanks, and dead men . . . starvation and piles of pota- toes, poverty and crates of eggs . . . death, disease, and death . . . swindles, graft, and usury . . . traditions, customs, and status quo . . . Anxiety . . . ANXIETY . . . anxiety . . . ' Here and everywhere . . . in painting . . . in the riotous notes of a Stravinsky symphonic piece . . . and others: Prokofieff, Shostakovich, Hindemith, Walton, Barber . . . in the poetry of E. A. Robinson,

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There once lived two gardeners. One raised lilies and the other raise ed wild snapdragons. One clay the lily gardener accused the other of raising weeds, the snapdragon gardener countered by saying that his snapdragons were flowers and that the lilies were weeds. The inen shot each other and died. Bef cause there was no one to irrigate them, the lilies soon died. The snapdragons lived happily ever aff KCT. When a baby is brought into the world, he is given the necessities of life: milk and warmth. Life, liberty and p1,L7'S'bLi1S of happiness are lux' aries which come long after. Mane kind is a baby, it needs its milk, FIRST. grit the teeth . . . grit the teeth . . . there is no easy way out . . . there is no easy way out . . . one world . . . one world . . . it can always be better , . . one world . . it can ale ways be better . . . this is one world that can always be better but not through the easy way out but by gritting the teeth . . . 8 1492, 1929? Greed, hate and jealousy, When man gave up the farm for the town, When man first tamed fire? r OR WAS IT A DAY UNKNOWN TO MAN WHEN MAN STOOD IN A GARDEN? PLUOIQ ED A ROSE, AND THOUGHT THAT A ROSE COULD NEVER BE A WEED OR A WEED NEVER A ROSE? What is the solution if the past cannot give a come plete answer? Burn the history books, cross out the past, abolish the national boundaries, blind the eyes to black and white and brown and yellow differences. Open the eyes and look at the earth: one planet with two billion people. ONE WORLD. Now ask, What does every man on earth want?'l Then list the answers: 1. food 2. clothes 3. work etc. Then start working until every man has his three square meals and has a shirt on his back. There is the answer. Now for the story of a world within a world: SO. lune 4, 1951. Seniors in scholastic robes march upon a stage and receive their degrees. A sheepskin bearing the words ubachelor of arts or bachelor of science is the climax of four years of college. Yet what kind of men and women are these? In four years of college they had erected for themselves a small theatre in which they enacted the best years of our lives . They paraded on the stage and grotesquely beamed spot lights on themselves. There were the big wheels who dashed about with their doubtful honors. There were the oodles of queens and scads of trophies. There were the brains and their silly three points. There were the moaners of the Tennessee Waltz, the bridge and canasta players. Some drank until drunk, some girls smoked furiously to keep up with a vogue. There were the who's whoers and the out- standing seniors who read about themselves in the Fargo Forum. Bundles of prejudices, all of them, possessing knowf ledge boiled down to one or two fields. YVhat else do they know? Nothing. They know nothing of interf national relations, nothing of psychology, nothing of family relations. They are inadequate in their future roles as world citizens. Tragic story this, yet how few realize it as the curtain rings down on the best years of ourlives. Tomorrow .........