Newspapers / Daily Tar Heel (Chapel … / July 24, 1986, edition 1 / Page 9
Part of Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.) / About this page
This page has errors
The date, title, or page description is wrong
This page has harmful content
This page contains sensitive or offensive material
When the Silent Sam left last April, and then, a month later, so did many of us. The graduates left to find some age, and he to remove some. For nearly 73 years he was this town's stoic sentinel, and then when he turned green, The Powers took him down. They said they'd bring him back healthy a bronzed, rejuvenated Sam but 1 knew they'd kill him. An exterior is all a statue's got. People now don't understand the natural hue of a respectable statue. They don't know that statues don't tan. They're making Silent Sam the Phyllis Diller of heavy metal, and it ought to cause a little flurry, incense a couple of closet radicals, I seem to be the only one mourning the loss of age, though, and so 111 have to speak because Sam never did. This is the time of the new things, the age that threatens all age. Eve ryone wants new things, new images and new ideas. The general idea seems to be that old things don't work. All this from the generation that grew up on plastic toys. Billy's G Tin Main gets nasty in mf plastic society Randall Patterson Staff Writer Plastic lasts forever. Whole bits of it often break in half, but it doesn't break down much further than that. In the next civilization, anthropol ogists will have in memory of us depthless piles of garbage bags that hold our sandwich bags, our milk cartons, our Barbies, Kens and G.I. Joes. They'll have our car interiors and kitchen counters, our plastic bullets and our drums of nuclear wastes. Plastic is eternal, but maybe one of the reasons our toys are in the trash is that plastic has no soul. You just can't cherish plastic. Barbie was a friend until you realized that real people wouldn't want to look like that and her date was a little groovy. You dropped the water pistol on the driveway, and in that battle you artoons" for became a casualty. So the plastic doll and the plastic gun are discarded in the plastic drum. Mom's doll was china, though, and Dad's gun was a replica of; the muskets circa the Revolutionary War.r Mom still has that doll, still . has her grandmother's doll made of cornhusks. They're enshrined now, demigods in the living room case. Dad gave his gun to me in one of those father-son rituals I was too young to understand. The gun had its end at my Alamo, when after running out of cork bullets, I began swinging at those rushing hordes of Mexicans. The Mexicans were Mag nolia leaves, and in a frenzy, I gave the whole troop of them a shiver, smacking at the tree's trunk. We're moving toward a plastic standard where plastic is the rule and not the exception. I wasn't used to the wooden exception. My toys had always been disposable, and I'd never cried at their departure until that rifle, when Dad made me. We young folks don't have histo ries, then, or at least mementoes to Goons what tx? C(LL n OoCS XT Tire TLV TVS by Billy Warden The mark them. All that was collected with the morning garbage, and our historian, the county dump, is as speechless as we should be. So we're timeless, and we could care less about time. It's our philosophy of plastic, our superficial, consume-and-dispose lifestyle. We do the easy thing, perhaps more so now than ever. We hold the easy ideals-and go for the easy life. To think is gauche, and the only issue that concerns us is the new drinking law. The number of people going for business degrees is up 1,200 percent since the early 1960s. Why? A good job at IBM, a good car, and later, a good wife. And somewhere in there Southern gentlemen 'Gone With the Wind' A vital part of the South is dying a slow, steady death. In bygone years, men of the South were called "South ern Gentlemen'' and ladies quivered to capture the affections of one of these. This is not so today. The "Southern Gentleman" is a dying breed as is the "lady," and it is a shame to see. A certain degree of etiquette used to be expected of young men. A young man who did not display his gentlemanly qualities by such simple rituals as door-opening, chair handling, and proper table manners was simply shunned by the young lady and her mother. The young lady expected to have her car door opened for her, her chair pulled out for her, and to be served first and addressed honorably in all situations. Today, it is a rare young man who could be called a gentleman and, if expecting gentlemanly behavior is one requirement for the term "lady," there are few young womea who could boast this term. Young men don't even think of things like opening the car door and extending a courteous hand to a date. Table manners are all but forgotten in all but the most well brought up. And simple things like handling the reservations at a nice restaurant are irksome tasks for the average young man. It is not surprising that this is so. Young women donV expect this stuff anymore, and it takes a great deal of the fun out of dates and just life in general. This may all sound trite and insignificant, but it is not. The decay of these small Southern chivalric values is evidence of decay on a large scale of the whole way that men look Lexers . needed The Summer Tar Heel always welcomes letters, provided they are typed double-spaced and include the author's name, major and year in school. Somebody out there must have an opinion on something take advantage of the editorial freedom afforded by your student newspaper. When you're sporting bifocals and a visibly receding hairline, you'll have a tattered newspaper clipping to remind you of your college career. Tar Heel Thursday, July 24, 19869 is the dog and the relaxing weekends, perhaps the only parts of our lives that we wouldn t throw away for a better model. No, Sam wasn't green with envy of this new world. They took Sam down because he was old, about to exceed the American life expectancy. Maybe they'll bring us Sam back in plastic, with a simulated-bronze veneer. And maybe we wont even mind. Randall Patterson is a senior journalism major from Chapel Hill waiting to be told poolside, "Plastics, Randall, plastics. That's where it's at." Bill Logan The Right Stuff at women. The purpose of all of these little rituals was to bestow honor on the lady, honor not for the purpose of deception in order to get some thing, but honor for the simple reason that the lady deserved honor. But between the women's liberation movement and all of the press about thwarting descrimination against women in the workplace, this impor tant factor, honor, has slowly given Way to apathy and, in some cases, competition between the sexes. In short, because of some who thought that these chivalric contrivances were degrading (a sadly mistaken conclu sion), women with the cooperation of weak-hearted men have, in -small ways, cheapened themselves in the eyes of men. Gone are the days of upholding a young lady's honor, and gone are the days of being able to tell a quality young man by his mannerisms. Young ladies, by not expecting such behavior of young men, you are depriving yourself of the honor that you deserve. Young men, by not giving young ladies such treatment voluntarily, you are depriving your self of much of the old fun and challenge of courtship. As a whole, our society becomes just a little more generic, loosing a really grand part of its character. Bill Logan is a junior biology major from Chapel Hill.
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
Standardized title groups preceding, succeeding, and alternate titles together.
July 24, 1986, edition 1
9
Click "Submit" to request a review of this page. NCDHC staff will check .
0 / 75