As I wrote on Facebook:
My son is fully an adult.
He was born two years after 9/11.
When you’re a kid the past is a jumble that’s hard to sort out. It’s all before times.
When I was in high school I read a lot. I read a lot of books that made a big impact on me. Some of those were assigned, though I did skip big chunks of assigned reading (I should get back to the Transcendentalists some day). I picked things up all over, like this: James Simon Kunen’s _The Strawberry Statement: notes of a college revolutionary_. I read it as a view into the distant past, history. I was sixteen or seventeen, 1980, 1981. So my “distant past” was 12, 13 years earlier - most of my lifetime, which was already so full.
I dipped into it today, and once again was engaged by Kunen’s dry humor, his ironic style, the hope and anger and dismay that has never stopped resonating, probably never will. I’ll probably send it to my nineteen-year-old college student, to see if he also finds a nineteen-year-old college student from 1968 wry and relatable.
[image: my hand holding a battered paperback with a black cover creased with white, the logo of Avon Books and the price $1.25 at the top, print filling the cover: the book's title The Strawberry Statement in white, subtitle Notes of a college revolutionary in yellow, author's name James Simon Kunen in orange, and, below a red line, also in red, "Wise, resonantly humane, very funny.... I'm suddenly very hopeful about my country again, knowing that a brilliant and honest young citizen like Mr. Kunen is coming along." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr."]
