OCR Text |
Show Youth's Foolishness a girl and a boy, students at Oberlin college, were saunt-" saunt-" ering along a railroad track on the edge of their college town the other evening. A train appeared in the distance. The boy -suggested that they sit on the track in front of the approaching approach-ing train and see who dared stay there the longest before jumping out of the way. The girl agreed. "'. It ended just as you would suppose. The girl, eager to prove her daring, stayed too long and got hit. She is now in a hospital with a broken collar bone, several broken ribs and some severe bruises. And she and the young man, possibly feel that they have learned something. A college freshman is more or less expected to be somewhat some-what silly. As a general thing, the freshman lives up to this expectation admirably. But a stunt like this one at Oberlin, where a boy and girl out of sheer bravado undertook a nonsensical non-sensical prank that nearly cost the girl her life, seems a bit more than we have any right to ask. However, nothing in particular is to be gained by meditating medi-tating that young people are foolish. They are, always have been and always will be. This foolishness does not arise from any mental incapacity; it is simply the inevitable result of high spirits and excess energy confronting a world that is unknown, testing it and trying to see how far fortune can be pushed. Very often this experimentation takes ludicrous, even tragic, forms. But the spirit back of it, for all that, is never ludicrous. A girl who sits on a -railroad track to see how long she dare wait before jumping out of the way of a train may be risking her life and behaving like a simpleton ; nevertheless, never-theless, that same girl, actuated by the same sort of restless curiosity and love of excitement, is one of the reasons why we' older-ones look on the world's future with hope. Suppose that you set out to recruit a host of daring souls to join you in some dangerous enterprise a "lost hope" revo-' revo-' lution, a desperate attack on entrenched injustice and wrong. Would you seek your recruits from the sensible, mature people peo-ple ? Never in the world ! You would go to the youngsters to the foolish, crack-brained kids who get into trouble because they don't know how to dodge the world's pitfalls. And they would follow you ! The same eagerness and lack of balance that drives them to do laughable, silly things would make them follow to any kind of death you directed, if only you gave them a flag and a slogan. The battlefields of the world have been littered with their bodies since wars began. Youngsters do foolish things, as in this case at Oberlin. But the tragedy of the whole thing is that they eventually get sensible, mature and very, very cautious. |