Life, Liberty, and….. Fraternity?

Published 8:29 am Wednesday, April 20, 2016

By CLAY MERCER

I’m a college man, a product of Presbyterian College, class of 1980, with a degree in Business Administration.  I finished somewhere in the middle of my class, but I never hang my head when I say that.
For one thing, my freshman class had two hundred and sixty five members, sixty percent of whom were valedictorians of their high school class.  Eighty five of us managed to graduate in four years.  That’s a thirty two percent success rate.
To say that the course of study was hard would be a massive understatement.
I learned two important facts while I was at Presbyterian College.  The first was that I really wanted to live the rest of my life in South Georgia.  The second was that only about a third of what I really learned in college came out of the classroom.
My college experience included membership in the Pi Kappa Phi (fraternity, one of six frats on campus.  The Kappa Alpha (KA) house was next door to the house.  We didn’t get along.  It’s not that we didn’t like each other as individuals, it’s just that there was a group rivalry that existed, had existed for decades, that would never go away.
We thought we were better than them, they thought they were better than us.  They built a wall on their deck so they wouldn’t have to look at our house when they had a party.  They saved us the expense of building a wall.
We also went ‘bush diving’ in their shrubbery.  One night “Big John” Templeton, may he rest in peace, drove his van squarely into the KA trash cans, sending them flying.  Since our membership was low, the KA’s frequently stole ‘for sale’ signs from around town and put them up in our front yard.  College pranks, but no real damage was done.
Each year, every frat had its spring formal.  We had Roseball, the KA’s had Old South, where they dressed up in Confederate uniforms, and, along with other KA chapters from around South Carolina, seceded from the Union.  Really.
So, while we had students at Presbyterian College from every continent on the Earth except Antarctica, we all got along.  We lived together and studied together and sweated our way through the tough classes together.
The KA chapter at Tulane University in New Orleans recently had their Old South Wall torn down because someone had painted Trump campaign slogans on the wall.  The wall was torn down by African American students who were offended by it.
They probably felt victimized, when the real victims were the frat boys who had their property torn down.  Nobody was arrested, nobody was charged, nobody went to jail.  The KA national office apologized.  For what?  Being politically active?
Let me say that the sooner the liberal lunatic left squashes the idea that seeing something you don’t like personally makes you a victim and justifies a violent reaction, the better off they’ll be.
What demographic is most often associated with violent acting out just because they can’t get what they want?  Two year old children, that’s who.
When I was in college we were just months away from entering the real world, earning a living, and building a life.  We weren’t being trained, and rewarded, for acting like two year olds.
So, when the Republicans beat a bunch of two year olds in the next presidential election, go throw a tantrum somewhere else, Junebug, because I ain’t having it.  I also recommend staying on public property while you do it because Republicans are really big on the Second Amendment.