senior, male engineering student who made a point of coming up to me in the
midst of a Sunday liturgy at St. Augustine's University Parish to shake my
hand vigorously and say, with smiling eyes and unmistakable fervor: "con-
gratulations!" Finally, there were the four men students, only one of
whom I
knew personally, who within two weeks of E-Day sent a letter to the Expo-
nent in which they said:
How remarkably symbolic that a public display which made crude allusions
to ovula-
tion (or, rather, the lack of it) should be smattered with the things themselves.
One can
only wish the eggs had been rotten.
We refer to the egg-bombing of the AIME float during the 1976 homecoming
parade.
In our eyes it was the grandest thing to come of all the assorted rickety-raktivities.
. .
The AIME float was crude and tasteless. It deserved no better treatment...15
On the Meaning of Being Moral
This letter, to be sure, sent additional shock waves through those mem-
bers of our campus community who were already in a state of anger and/or
general confusion in the once closed and comfortable context of traditional
remarks expressing traditional ideas of a traditional value system, that,
namely, of powerism displayed in its most traditional (and universal) form,
sexism. In particular I submit that angry reactions this time among the foes
re-
vealed a primary characteristic of any inverted value system, a mind-
muddledness which makes it extremely difficult if not impossible to recognize
the difference between a violation of (or violence done to) persons and an
interference with such a violation itself through an attack upon the vehicle(s)
of person-centered violence.
Such blindness, I would further argue, is but a reflection of the darkness
created by an inverted value system because such a system of its nature
makes it difficult if not impossible for those who take it for granted, find
it ac-
ceptable or, at any rate, 'harmless,' to see that the context of their lives
de-
pends upon the stultification rather than the enhancement of human exis-
tence, the diminution rather than the expansion of personal freedom, and
the
rejection rather than the promotion of social responsibility. Both the timorous
(controlled) and the pretentious (controllers) in such a setting cannibalize
each other's souls. Thus any persons from an alien context who dare to in-
terrupt this subtle savagery can hardly avoid the role not only of disturbers
of
the peace but also of threats to public security, the security, that is,
of "know-
ing" what is socially sanctioned and what is not.
Hence, in the experience, for example, of many women and men students
at Platteville the controversy-filled weeks immediately following October
9,
1976 were painfully unsettling. And while eventually, after many intense
dis-
cussions both outside of classrooms and within them (and especially within
the classes of my departmental colleagues), a genuine development of moral
consciousness seemed to occur among a number of students who theretofore
had never been faced with so concrete an occasion to reflect on the reality
of
legitimized, person-centered violence, initially the reaction of what I would
judge was the majority of students ranged from anger to dismay - not over
the traditional braggadocio of male vs. female power exhibited on the mining
engineers' outhouse float but over the audacious behavior of the egg brigade
in showing scorn for the exhibit.


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