High Times at U.T.
High Times at U.T.
Nope, in case you’re wondering, it’s not that kind of article. I ended my love affair with recreational herbs a year before beginning my five-year incarceration at the University of Texas. Even worse for a kid headed off to the last stronghold of Communism in Texas, I was moving towards a conservative interpretation of life. But I did discover another means of peaceful bliss, high above the clamor of 40,000 college students and 20,000 staffers.
My first semester experiencing the cosmic undertow of Austin was an eye-opening change of life. I was already taking some difficult courses in the School of Engineering and, needing a language course atop the rigors of all the math, I foolishly assumed I could easily conquer Classic Greek.
Besides the challenges of living on my own — sort of (I had a roommate who had also never lived outside his parents’ home) — I was dealing with an entire new level of educational challenges. That’s when I discovered the twenty-seven-story University of Texas tower. The observation deck was a short, although scary, elevator ride to a tiny guard desk at the top.
If you didn’t grow up in Texas, you may not be familiar with the tower’s sordid history. In August of 1966 (just before I entered sixth grade) a deranged ex-Marine named Charles Whitman, commandeered the tower’s observation deck and began a three-hour shooting spree wherein he killed fifteen people and injured another thirty-one from his well-protected sniper’s nest.
For many years afterward, the tower’s observation deck remained closed to the public. However, not long before I began my stint at the University, the observation deck re-opened and I found it an exceptional place to spend my lunch hour, decompressing from the pressures of my new life. That aerie in the sky provided a quiet respite from the noise and bustle below, and somehow, it offered me a sanctuary to get my thoughts back together.
I also found other great advantages to the tower’s observation deck in the Spring of 1975. Just to the North of the tower was Kinsolving Dorm, an all-female dormitory and to my great delight, many of those girls used the dorm’s rooftop deck as a place to sunbathe.
As you might expect in a liberal environment like Austin, some of those girls were less than prudish in their quest for the perfect tan, especially when they assumed they were free from prying eyes. I was not above borrowing my roommate’s binoculars — another escape from the pressures of university life.
For two years, that tower was my favorite spot on campus. However, during that time, the occasional disgruntled student, under even greater pressure than myself, would choose to leap from that observation deck and end their life. One serious individual even chose to dive into an outdoor eating area at the base of the tower during lunchtime, creating serious havoc.
Consequently, the University once again closed the observation deck to public access, leaving me not just to find a new haven of quiet, but to seriously ponder how someone’s life circumstances — especially in the carefree atmosphere of Austin — could drive them to the point of suicide. I decided then and there that if school ever became that much of a burden, I’d sell my Earthly goods and head back out on the road to hitchhike around America.
It wasn’t until twenty-six years later when a bunch of religious zealots flew commercial aircraft into another pair of towers, crippling the financial markets, and subsequently, bankrupting all of my telecom clients, that I learned how quickly life’s circumstances could shift for the worse, bringing a person to fantasize about leaping from a lofty height for one last moment of weightless flight, free from the pressures of failure.
Luckily, I found some good counseling that got me through those dark times, but I still wonder how many people I interact with on a daily basis are harboring those fantasies of freedom from the unbearable pressures of failed dreams. Maybe you’re one of those people. Maybe you’re too scared to even admit that you’re one of those people. Let’s talk.
Let’s talk. I’d really like to hear what you have to say, and it might even give me something to write about. Email me at guy@lawsoncomm.com.
I’ll buy you coffee and we can compare notes. I promise not to steal your ideas without permission.
The more clearly we recognize how deep our commitment to self-protection operates in our relational style and the more courageously we face the ugliness of protecting ourselves rather than loving others, the more we’ll shift our direction.
— Larry Crabb
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Black Rednecks
& White Liberals
— Thomas Sowell
I first heard about this book when it was mentioned in Sowell’s “A Man of Letters” which I recently finished reading. It becomes rapidly obvious why the media ignored this book when it was new, but Sowell’s research-based insights are at it again in this book. His life as a senior fellow at the Hoover institute provided the opportunity to build his arguments on empirical data rather than popular emotion and he is rapidly becoming the dominant tennant of my bookshelf.
A meeting of great minds who think alike
