by Clayton Fox at Brownstone Institute
Looming over my city of Evanston, Illinois is Northwestern University, home of the Wildcats, alma mater of David Schwimmer, Kathryn Hahn, and real American lunatics like Rod Blagojevich and Rahm Emanuel. When I was a child, my parents signed me up for extracurricular classes here on the weekends; college professors actually taught us school kids about everything from physics to economics to politics.
It was a dream. I’d spend my Saturdays getting to walk on campus with the big kids and quench my relentless thirst for knowledge. After class, my parents would pick me up and we’d go to the food court, and I would get Pizza Hut and tell them what I’d learned.
University was a place to aspire to, learning was precious, and exciting, pizza was salty and good. These are things I knew when I was eight years old. When I went to college in New York, I learned other things, as one does. Cities are a good place to be young, and carrying four bags of groceries up and down four sets of subway stairs in two boroughs is totally normal.
I learned about drama, literature, physics, and international relations too. But mostly, I learned how to be a human being. I learned this from my classmates, some of my teachers, and the city itself. I don’t think I needed University to learn these things, but it was a blessing to have been given a cocoon in which to learn them. I learned how to have a girlfriend, and what love feels like, what heartbreak feels like, and how not to break up with someone. I learned how to rely on myself to seek medical care if I needed it, and to buy furniture, and to rent a storage unit. I learned other things too.
I’m not sure there is anything more achingly lovely than an eighteen year old tasting freedom for the first time, striking out on their own. I couldn’t see it in myself at the time, I was too busy experiencing it, but now I see it in you, my neighbors. Though I’m not sure you’re being given the freedom to be achingly lovely.
While riding my bike through the Northwestern campus on what must have been the first day of class, Fall 2021, I passed a long line of students wearing masks, outdoors, waiting to enter some building, or a residence hall. It wasn’t clear, but it was striking.
Young, healthy, presumably vaccinated, masked bodies standing in single file down a sad stretch of sidewalk at the end and the beginning of another sad year. It occurred to me as I passed them, and continued to pass them, loaded up with books, loaded up with bags, full of eager energy, that I was heartbroken for them, and furious. It occurred to me that what has been perpetrated on their generation, ten plus years removed from mine, is fucked up and outrageous.
Dear students, when the pandemic first emerged, I callously mocked the people who said that it was criminal to interrupt your developing years. I figured it was the price we all had to pay, and that you’d get over it, that you were young and therefore durable. I was wrong. I am ashamed and I am sorry. You are more precious than that. You have things to learn, ineffable things that cannot be delayed, and cannot be replaced. Some of those things are so deep, so essential, that in the process of learning them you may even find yourself confronted—on some wonderfully drunken walk home—with the question of whether we are here for a purpose, or whether we are all alone?
I watched E.T. again recently. Have you seen it? I can’t be sure since some of you don’t know Hendrix and think The Doors are 3 Doors Down. Every generations’ cultural touchstones rotate, much to the chagrin of the ones who came before. E.T. is my favorite Spielberg film, and it might be my favorite film of all. It’s achingly lovely. It concerns a young California family recovering from divorce, and especially a young man named Elliot, a middle child looking for something, maybe love. In the film he gets it in the form of a visitor from the stars, a creature that he comes to call E.T.
E.T. and Elliot form a supernatural bond, like brothers…
Continue Reading