Indoctrination

Striking a blow for the Common Man, Rick Santorum stated, "President Obama once said that he wants everyone to go to college. What a snob. There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor trying to indoctrinate them."

Thanks for setting us straight, Rick. I was unaware that shipping off to college in America is not all keg parties and co-ed dorms but political indoctrination not unlike Chinese youth being sent to the countryside during Mao's Cultural Revolution. They must have edited the political indoctrination scenes out of "Animal House" and "Old School".

Actually, my decision to go to college was not a slam dunk. Fear of being brainwashed by a pointy-headed liberal professor really didn't enter into the equation. My choices as a high school grad in the summer of 1965 were:

Get a draft-deferred job at the artillery shell plant in town. Make more money than my Dad. Get my own car. Live at home with free room, board, and laundry service. Have a rip-roaring social life since few girls went away to college in those days.
2. Go to college. Have no money, no transportation, and at an all-male college with no fraternity rush until second semester, zero social life.

Taking a page from that education-loving snob Obama, my parents pushed me toward the groves of academia by getting me a summer job in the local meat packing plant. The "good, decent men who put their skills to the test" there made sure that the "college boy" got a snoot-ful of working life. Lifting and hauling 250 pound sides of beef? Let Joe College do it. Loading 400 pound barrels of beef onto the truck at the end of the day? I have a softball game at 5. The College Kid can work a little later. Somebody has to spend a couple of hours sorting 80 pound boxes in the -10° freezer? Young blood is warm blood. See you at lunch, kid.

Sudddenly, I could tolerate delaying a paycheck, a car, and a social life until after college especially if it meant that I wouldn't smell like a dead cow every day after work. Even the liberal political indoctrination was a small price to pay.