Sig Eps and Hippies

I saw that video of the OU fraternity a couple nights ago.  No sooner had the first line of the chant been recited than I went, “Oh, golly! Sig Eps again!”  Back in 1969, my first year at Kansas State, I had friends in three frats all on one block—Farmhouse, AGP and SAE.  The Sig Eps must have been the movie inspiration for “Animal House”.  There is something about 19 year olds, who have their first taste of adulthood yet fear maturity.  Booze, hazing, panty raids, pot and parties—anything but growing up!  Sig Eps were in competition for the Bad Boys Award with the Betas and Teeks.

Now once again the Sig Eps are getting disciplined by the U.  Then come the inevitable marches by those they have offended with all sorts of speculation about how racism surely infects all of Caucasian society. (Isn’t that assumption racist?)  Ugh!  And the inevitable statements by the college Prez and Black Ministerial alliance.  I coulda predicted this. 

Come to think of it, all of us said stupid stuff at 19.  I remember OU’s Brian Bosworth lipping off.  Roll my eyes.  The sportscasters had a fit over his unbridled mouth—role model for the kids!  I just saw a 19 year old playing football. 

I guess I didn’t have the wild oats experience.  I tripped at the starting gate.  At 19, I was a single parent and scraping to fund college.  Two 20 hour jobs living somewhat betwixt a monk and desperate poverty.  No nonsense allowed.  Surrounded by hippies making love, not war and the frat rats, I just longed for a degree.  Worse, a degree in physics, a field everyone shunned because of scarce jobs.  You had to wait for someone to die to get a job. 

There once was a young man from Trinity

Who took the square root of infinity

But the number of digits

Gave him the fidgets

He gave up mathematics for divinity. 

I suppose many of the hippies and frat brothers have fond memories of their marches or the college sports or the bars along Aggieville.  I remembers the libraries. I used take a break from  theoretical physics in the libraries.  Found the architectural library in Seaton Hall.  From Ken Kerns and Frank Lloyd Wright and many others, I put pictures in my head of houses I would like to see which are still there, inspiring as I remodel houses today.  I would go the main library and read about commercial market garden farming and it gave me a lifelong hobby.  I especially remember the economics section, housed between those half-floor stacks.  Milton Friedman, Graham and Dodd, Hayek and Phil Fisher and Andrew Mellon.  All the better to become an investor who thinks about the business of business. Amazing how much I now realize I owe to the U. And even the matter of politics,

There is an advantage to having failures and struggles at a young age rather than the life of fast cars and radical politics.  I lived upstairs from a Harvard graduate who was heavily invested in the anti-war movement.  (Post grad work paid by daddy at KSU.)  And he landed me in the Young Democrats, which was an interesting diversion since it was stimulating and had free admission.  The young libs were rather like the frat bros but they “acted out” on politics instead of binge drinking and bigotted frat songs.   

Nothing in the world meant more to me in those days than my infant daughter and my faith.  I had gone to a Christian college but failure and a repentant heart made faith grow.  Later I would join The Navigators campus ministry.  One day I met a student on campus who spoke in a foreign accent and had only about half his fingernails. Why the missing nails? Disease?  No, he said, he and his parents had been Christians in Latvia.  To attend the church was to attend a place where the priest was a KGB agent.  So his folks had quiet house meetings to pray and read the Bible.  The communists found out and arrested, then tortured his dad.  His father wouldn’t tell who else was in on this conspiracy.  That’s when they brought his son in and began to pull out his fingernails.  He was 8 years old. 

I about choked, thinking of my precious daughter and the horror of such cruelty.  But I was skeptical.  I remembered one Young Dem who claimed quite loudly that he was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA Youth.  So I asked him if communism was capable of such things.  Instead of giving some placating negative, he began to trash Christianity and how we should all vow to defeat it.  What I didn’t realize at that moment was that you cannot join the Communist Party unless you swear to work to forever destroy Christianity and squelch any other opiate of the people. Why is Christianity singled out?  Well, as Wurmbrand wrote after interviewing Karl Marx’s children, Marx wasn’t really an atheist.  He was a Satanist who really did seem to have something going with Satan—altar in his bedroom, worship time where he could not be disturbed, plays written about Satanic beings he had met.  I speculate that Marx had a good information source that Jesus Christ was The Truth, unlike all the other opiates of the people.

I went home that evening musing that I had about had it with politics and would probably never get involved again, unless I ever ran across such Christian faith-hating in some way.  That setting seemed to come together in 2009.  Here was a President and a party that sued a church saying that the EEOC, not the church had a say in who got to be the ministers. Here was a party who demanded that a church fund abortifacients, that military chaplains could not preach the gospel in some instances, that gays had to be married and served by those of contrary religious faith.  We can survive Barack Obama. But can we survive a party that loudly votes to remove God from their party platform with boos and catcalls? Methinks the godless hippies and agnostic frat rats have taken over, only this time they are 60 years old.  And so the final thing I owe to my university education is the clear realization that there is a war going on between right and wrong and only God can declare the end to it.  But this question hangs in the air.  Are you ready to do battle?

Probably sounds goofy to you if you still think the Democrats are just good guys who want a bit more security from the government.  Admittedly, many rank and file are exactly that.  But there is something more sinister beneath.