Vance, I think you are on target although you may be implying some blame to the high tech and mechanized society that may not be valid. I'll stick my neck out and say that I lay some blame on the G.I. Bill after WWII. The law of unintended consequences. A good idea, to educate those who had lost four years of their development (those who hadn't lost their lives), but a consequence was "universal college education". And that led to a requirement for a college degree (not the learning, just the degree) for mid level corporate jobs. And those were seen as the key to both financial and personal success. Trades became downgraded, manual skills were denigrated.
I'll digress with a personal comment. I have an A.B. in Psychology (Princeton, 1957), but my high school insisted that even the college prep students take wood shop and metal shop and learn to use their hands (and the boys had to take Home Ec. - sewing and cooking, and the girls the wood and metal shops - but each a less intensive course). My college class has a fund, donated by the more well off, that I helped start when one of the class "swallowed a gun" in 1975. He was National Marketing Manager for a major corporation. He got fired. He spent two years pretending to his wife and children that he was going to work, and paying for their private schooling and orthodontics through saving, debt and not paying the bills. He killed himself the day the Sheriff came to his home to impound his possessions. Wally saw himself not as a person but as his job title. Our class fund doesn't offer financial bail out, it offers interim help and an attempt to make the classmate aware that whatever he does he is yet the same person. And I think that is what you are saying. One of the nice things about being a graduate of Princeton from my era is that making money isn't the criterion of success. Some of our most able and respected classmates have taught secondary school for a lifetime. I'm not sure if it is the same today. I remember an annual reunion in 1977, our twentieth. I sat at a table with the Controller of the City of NY (Jay Goldin), the spokesman for the State Department (Hod Carter) and a Minnesota State Senator. With us was Moose Adams. Moose had hitchhiked from a commune in New Mexico for the reunion, and I was working delivering used cars for a dealer (and was sleeping in a borrowed car from my boss). Moose and I regaled the other three for hours with stories of living on the edge, they were almost jealous as they hadn't experimented with their lives. OK, I ramble as usual. Your point is well taken. Success in life isn't something you can measure with a bank account - and too many of today's young people think it is. Not that they are that different than we were, nor a change in the overall society. I might suggest some blame to the mass media, the lovely NYC apartments that the TV sitcom losers have, or the pressure for celebrity (in many years in business I never met someone like Donald Trump, he isn't a businessman - he is an entrepreneur who has put money in his pocket while losing money for his stockholders by playing the celebrity magazines - a business man creates jobs and succeeds with his employees and stockholders). Thje word "values" has come into disrepute in the recent campaign, but they exist. Craftsmanship is valid not only for a luthier but also a computer programmer. My son is a law professor (luckily for him he had the talent for the law, as he hasn't a bit of skill with his hands). But he is a professor at a community type law school with mainly night students, and isn't highly paid. But he hated the practice of Corporate law with the "rainmakers" and the pressures to make money for the partnership - so he bailed out of the pressure cooker and went to what he liked - the theory of law and the teaching. I'm proud of him, he makes less money but takes better care of my grandsons. Walt Levering, Yale '58, ski bummed with me in the early sixties. He became a Ski Patrolman, then in later years I found out he was managing a Ski Lodge in Vermont - I bet he is happier (and therefore more successful) than some of his classmates. I'm broke (and may have to appeal to the very classmate's fund I helped to start), but everytime one of my more "successful" friends says "I'm going off on a ski vacation" I can think - hell, I did that when you were grinding for money, and I had the legs to do it then. I don't miss those things I can no longer afford as I have a mind full of memories of doing them when I could do them well. So now I've come back to the wood working, and the playing of instruments - but I couldn't come back to them if I'd never been there, if I'd never seen them as a part of me. Enough, your comments are quite accurate. And the phrase "spiritual suicide" is one I'll remember for future use. Death is when the mind ceases to operate, and in some people that happens in life. I'll add one more thing, I travelled the world in 1945 at the age of ten. I was crippled by a rather nasty case of polio (then known as Infantile Paralysis) and spent a lot of years on my back, and a close contender for an "iron lung" existence. Being now a year from seventy I take umbrage when friends of my vintage say "I'd rather die than be incapacitated". Been there, done that. As long as your mind works you can go anywhere. If your fingers can't play your instrument then you can imagine the sounds they might make, and you can make variations on the theme. If you can think you can imagine, and find someone else to transcribe your musical thoughts (easier now with the computer). And that is the tragedy of the young suicides, they've always been there but usually the early teens "in love". After all, that is Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare saw the syndrome. Imagine what might have happened if they had gotten together, Romeo at twenty decides he'd rather spend time with Rosalind, and Juliet is stuck with the kids. But these ones today seem a bit different in quality if not in quantity. And they tend to try to take others with them (Columbine). I'll not try to analyse it, merely make this excessively long message. And for the rest of you on the list, just remember that even if you lose your "chops" you yet have a value, you just have to define it. Best, Jon > Dear Herbert: > > IMHO most of the suicide rate is related to the fact that most young adult > males feel it is incumbent upon them to make a lot of money when in fact > their heart's desire to do something else. The idea of craftsmanship and > doing what your guts tell you, you were born to do, are of such little > concern that there are those that cannot deal with the self betrayal. We > live in a high tech and mechanized society and have drifted away from > concepts of craftsmanship, musicianship, and artistic creativity. Some > people can cope through hobbies, but others are so driven to become > something that they are not they, in essence have committed spiritual > suicide before they actually pull the trigger or take the jump. > > Vance Wood. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
