John Sebastian [© CSP Images]

BOOMERANGST: Where Have All The Good Times Gone?

By Roy Trakin

When I first took my daughter Tara up to UC Davis last September, I noticed a big sign plastered across the bulletin board in her dorm room: No alcohol! No drugs! No illegal downloading! (by order of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act).

It surprised me to see downloading lumped in with alcohol and drugs, but after all, the college campus, with its high-speed Internet connections long before they became commonplace, was the chief spawning grounds for sites like Napster in the ‘90s, through any number of illicit sites like Limewire, Gnutella, eDonkey, Kazaa and BitTorrent today.

The admonition against booze and drugs wasn’t quite as much of a shock, though I can still remember one of the things I looked forward to in leaving home to go to college was being able to smoke pot without worrying about getting caught by my parents. In fact, my first week of college at Colgate wasn’t even over before we were dubbed the “Flight Deck,” and warned by our resident advisers to cool it. I remember hitch-hiking on old Route 20 back from Syracuse after a John Sebastian concert and getting caught by the state police with a hash pipe bought on Marshall Street, which had the residue of something inside--it certainly wasn’t drugs, though, even if it did register as a “foreign substance.”

After her first week, my daughter called home with that tell-tale quaver in her voice, completely overwhelmed and feeling alone. She had attended some fraternity parties where the beer was flowing in an Animal House atmosphere, and worried that she didn’t fit in. I told her she would find her own niche soon enough, to look around for the artsy, intellectual crowd, which she could find by the telltale smell of marijuana smoke. I believed that then, and I believe it now. Smoking pot is a communal experience, and some of the people I shared with back in my freshman year are still friends to this day.

Of course, back in 1974, the price tag for an elite Eastern, liberal arts private school like Colgate ran $4k a year, affordable even for my middle-class parents, while today, that tuition has climbed to more than 10 times that. Kids now don’t attend college to dabble, or even find themselves, but to be able to get a job upon graduation so they can afford to pay back those student loans they’ve racked up. I feel kind of sorry for my son and daughter’s generation, being forced to grow up so quickly, but in a way, they’re a lot more mature and prepared than I was at their age. And I’m certainly glad that drugs and alcohol aren’t the rites of passage they were for us. Still, I can’t help but feel something is missing from their collegiate experience…and I don’t just mean the ability to file-share.