We’ve absorbed so much foolishness, it has become part of us. We drip with it.

This morning, I read about a reaction of the student government at Emory University after some students reported they had felt threatened after seeing “Donald Trump 2016” written in chalk on some campus sidewalks. The student government was offering free professional counseling to the threatened ones. I wonder what counsel the professionals might offer those thus threatened?

“You think THIS is something to worry about?” any prudent counselor might ask. “You should worry about getting a job with your gender/ethnic/cultural studies degree after you graduate and your quarter of a million dollars in student loans start to mature. Our counsel is that you work to gain some maturity ahead of your loans.”

“But I am voting for Bernie Sanders,” said the Trump-threatened sophomore, a shrug of the shoulders offered as a denial of concern about any sort of loan repayment obligations after having already spent $100,000 matriculating at the very expensive Emory.

“That’s a sophomoric attitude, less mature than your loans,” said the counselor.

The student looked impatiently at the counselor with a look exactly like the one his own parents see every time they try to reduce the coddle factor. The Counselor winced in advance of what he knew was coming. “What did you expect?” asked the student in a flash of the beginnings of maturity, which starts at the recognition of the obvious. “I am a sophomore.”

I wonder if the student fully understands all the privileges that go along with being a sophomore?

After another article I read, sophomoric seems downright mature. I have yet to decide what was worse: that someone wrote an article reporting on what a freshman (a FRESHMAN) thought about ISIS, the Presidential election, and the problems with immigration: that the on-line magazine published it: or, perhaps the worst, that I took the time to read it. I not only read it, I studied it for the most subtle hints of sarcasm. There were none. I was thunderstruck. I was nonplussed. I was overtaken in lamentations for what has become of our post-modern communications. It seems we are beyond post-modern. We are double post-post modern, consuming worthless Orwellian doublespeak as if it had some nutritional value. Since when does a freshman have any political analysis that is newsworthy? I suppose it was not a complete waste of my time. There was some entertainment factor.

One of the Presidential candidates has offered a three point plan to get rid of ISIS jihad-ism and terror. If I may paraphrase the three points, they are, in order of urgency: 1 – Ask them nicely to stop it; 2 – Remind them that they are supposed to stop it; 3 – Repeat as necessary. This noble plan may have been jointly developed by the aforementioned sophomore and freshman. No doubt, it is a good plan, with the best of noble intentions, which are all that really matter….intentions. Results don’t matter. Only intentions matter. In fact, if I may borrow from another meme/befuddlement: All intentions matter.

“What are your intentions?” a stone-faced father once asked a sophomore picking up his daughter for a date.

“I am trying to start something called the ‘hookup culture’ by which I hope to expose the outmoded concepts of family and traditional values by purposefully engaging in casual, meaningless sex, discarding the entrapments of marriage and encouraging women to be truly liberated by freeing them of repressive, sexual constraints while promoting their personal fulfillment through the exploration of the multiple partnered/multiple orgasm,” said the sophomore intellectual. “As a side project, for the benefit of the public-at-large, we have signed up for a CDC study on the spread of Chlamydia.”

The father shouted to his wife who was in the garage putting a new supercharger on her methanol-fueled dragster (in former times I would have merely said she was in the kitchen, but that is too sexist nowadays), “Honey, you’d better dial 9-1-1. There’s fixing to be a major emergency here.”

Freshmen and sophomores, everywhere, are hoping to be able to repay their student loans with $15.00 per hour minimum wage jobs, at least until they get their loans forgiven, then they’ll make payments to the IRS for the income for having had their loans forgiven and for not having health insurance. They have not even thought about the robots that will soon be taking the minimum wage jobs for a bit less money but a lot more reliability, but then again, thinking about how to adequately prepare for their future is not something associated with sophomores and freshmen.

There is no stopping point, really. But if I don’t quit now, I may begin to name names and talk about specific political candidates. I have played this election, thus far, pretty close to my chest, but I could erupt in a plume of fire and ashes any minute, particularly if I get a few more lectures from sophomores and freshmen who graduated a long time ago, and have entered, or hope to enter, lucrative government service, or perhaps win a job as an adjunct professor at a major university, earning nearly as much money as a bluegrass musician, and with almost as many benefits.

Absorbed foolishness? Eventually one saturates and begins to drip.

I suppose I am the chief dripper.

©2016 Mississippi Chris Sharp