University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Yackety Yack Yearbook (Chapel Hill, NC)

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appropriately-horrified eyes on a movie screen; thirty seconds later, we laugh at the Chaplinesque Nazi goose-steppers, the gas ovens are for- gotten, and we see no connection between the passive German citizenry which watched while Hitler aspired to holy heights and our own attitudes of folded hands and meekly nodding heads; we who would no more pro- test an action of our government, on any level, than we would question the sun ' s daily journey. Dissipation flourishes in Chapel Hill; we all have wallowed in it • — met new ideas and concepts with closed minds and puerile jibes. A student pickets a theatre in pro- test against segregation; another stu- dent riding past in an automobile shouts nigger lover ! And nothing is changed. A Nobel Prize-winning chemist soberly states that the fallout from nuclear tests will kill and deform hundreds of thousands of yet unborn children; we listen, applaud politely, and disperse to restaurants and coffee shops to placate our stomachs; and none of us moves to act. The incomprehensibly murderous tale of Auschwitz flashes before our Page 26

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desperate relations between negroes and whites; the blindly-believing super-Nathan Hales ' who relegate to political purgatory, communism, socialism and any government other than that by the Constitution of the United States of America; the lib- erals among us who found solace in slogans and whose easily satisfied hearts numbed their questioning minds until they were able to respond only to the slogans of their fellow believers. Through fear or slothful- ness (certainly not in most cases from any lack of mental celerity) , we have Page 25

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not the wholehearted, self-destroying actions of the dope addict or the almost-reverent libations of the hope- less alcoholic, but more subtle, less obvious forms. Dissipation is the squandering of talent or time, and who of us has not cast away huge chunks of his life upon aimless am- bling after pleasure or upon purpose- ful retreats from some unpalatable aspects of life? We who see — God knows, we all should be able to see by now — that professors ' lectures at times are something more than im- pressive polysyllabic exercises and that our minds were made not to parrot but to create. We who have realized this are derelict toward our- selves if we do not act on this know- ledge. It is hard to speak of respon- sibilities and duties without ap- proaching pedantry, for the abundant drivel covering the two words has long since repelled students weary of good, sound advice; but nonetheless, these duties and responsibilities still exist, if in no other sense than Polonius ' much admired and seldom- followed admonition: To thine ownself be true. It is also difficult to speak without lapsing into pathos of our leaving the University, to avoid falling into the Old Well — Bell Tower — Hark the Sound syndrome which is fitting and good for class reunions, but hardly conducive to any serious speculation as to the student, his years here at Carolina, and his life afterwards. But graduation from college is a dividing point, a meridian. On one side of the dividing line, the life of a student: thousands of hours in classrooms positively reeking of shamelessly re- peated facts and opinions and of the fe Page 27