I've not been in a terribly creative season lately. Even this story is not new. I wrote it back in 1991 for a creative writing class at IUPUI. I aced all my stories in both creative writing classes and aced my poems in my poetry class. I'd have taken more, but I had a lot of course work to do. Looking back, I realize that my stories from that era were meant for theatrical presentation. This particular story is all first person narrative and has, obviously, a strong voice. I had a thought in my mind as I wrote it and that is that we were born to be complete and whole human beings but some great magic deprived us of that humanity and our life's task is to strive to find it once more. Some people never seem think about what it means to be a human being. It is an odd question to them. There was a time when getting an education meant that we had to study that very question. We studied "the humanities" and that included art, poetry, literature, culture. We studied it because we knew it was important to become human beings and to participate in our human dialogue--a conversation that has been going on for thousands and thousands of years, ever since the first hunter or prophet stood up and used the power of speech to tell a story.
But now people are interested in vocational studies, and business, and so the humanities are dying on college campuses. Now we no longer educate. The Latin root implies a sense of being lead forth and that means out of ignorance and into enlightenment. But this is long lost. Now people just want the promise of big bucks and a degree is a ticket to that. It is one more step backward. It is now a purely animal instinct driving higher vocational training (formerly called "college"). College has been industrialized. People who want to "get ahead" in life in that survival-of-the-fittest-world our western capitalism has created for us now pay for their own job training, and they are paying higher than ever tuition to do it. It is a world of hawks training hawks. (mind you I am speaking of metaphorical hawks. Real hawks are splendid things to behold, but they feed on prey all the same.) It is my hope that some of us remember who and what we are. That we might regain our lost humanity.
