Home for Alumni Weekend

Well, I am now a member of the Golden R Club, which means basically that I graduated from Ripon College and managed to live another 50 years, which let me tell you is not necessarily an easy thing to do.

They welcomed us into the club with open arms, let us wander around the campus and see what has changed and what has not in five decades, fed us possibly the most delicious salmon I’ve ever eaten, and gave us a pin, a certificate, and some quality time with friends and acquaintances from a lifetime ago.

It was good to see the old stomping grounds. I actually ended up spending another seven years in Ripon as a “townie” for a total of 11 years, the longest I had lived in any community to that time, so Ripon is as much my hometown as either of the New Jersey towns where I spent my youth — and I’ve never left Wisconsin since.

I brought Mary along and told her the stories behind the old landmarks, including the Ripon Cinema, the first establishment in the chain of Marcus enterprises. The family has held onto the little theater over the decades, even though it’s too small to handle more than one movie at a time. I kind of wish we’d had the time to go inside and see how it’s been preserved and/or updated.

The weekend was a little bittersweet; in all likelihood I will never see most of my classmates again. I’m tempted to crash the Classes of 1976 and ’77 over the next two summers because of the number of friends I had in those two classes. By this time next year, who knows? A lot can happen in 365 days.

I wish I’d had more time to talk with some of the folks I bumped into, although I wouldn’t trade the time I had with the old friends we did spend most of the visit with. Our table won the Jeopardy game that followed dinner, largely on the strength of having two former WRPN-FM announcers and two of the categories featuring 1970s music. We ran the “Name That Tune” category by identifying snippets from hit songs of our college years.

Reunions in five-year increments were held around campus and town, including the Golden R classes of 1970, 1965 and 1960. A few of us look almost the same; all of us move more slowly, and some look pretty darn frail. Life will do that to ya.

Bottom line, I’m glad we went, I’m glad I attended Ripon College back in the day, and I’m glad I came home for a weekend in the place that started my lifetime in Wisconsin.

(If the pin already looks a little worn, it’s because I left it in my shirt pocket and found it at the bottom of the washing machine Tuesday afternoon. Oops!)

Not This

I have no quarrel with anyone on Earth that is serious enough to wish them dead. And so I find myself at a loss to understand anyone who would make a point by killing people en masse, or by ordering such killings.

Having seen the wreckage from the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago this summer, why would anyone say, “Holy man, I want to build me some of those?”

Why would you open a laboratory to research ways to make deadly viruses even more deadly? What maniac would deploy such weapons?

Why invest trillions of dollars in building devices with no other purpose than to break things and kill people?

Warfare is not only immoral and a crime against humanity, it is based on an absurdity. It is not grounded in common sense or logic. Killing vast numbers of people who disagree with you will never convince the survivors that you were right.

I can understand arguments that some violent act was committed in self-defense — understand, but not accept. That’s as far as I can go. If we are creatures of reason, there is always a reasonable alternative to violence. Violence solves nothing and can only lead to more violence. Violence is the failure of reason.

“But there’s no reasoning with these people,” one often hears, committing the first act that can lead to violence — reducing individuals with whom we have differences to “these people,” stripping them of their uniqueness. It’s hard to murder one person in cold blood, a little easier if he is one of “these people.”

I’m not here to say what should be done in any specific instances where people resort to war. “What would you have done, Warren?” The only answer I have is: Not this.

Nor am I in a position to criticize choices made by individuals charged with making those choices. I am simply here to mourn — mourn for the dead, mourn for people who felt this resort was the necessary one, and pray that they truly believed this was the last resort.

As always, there’s always much taking of sides out there, a lot of sanctimonious discussion about who is right and who is wrong. I’ll leave that to people who have no sin to atone.

As for me, I’m deeply disappointed that we are having these discussions in a culture based on the teachings of one who said to love God, love our neighbors, love our enemies. These actions and these discussions are far removed from love.

And so I am here to mourn.