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By Jean Kinkead
Yesterday we were downing Pepsi's in our favorite jernt, and in came two queens from high school. But queens — with smoothie long sweaters and pale blue reversibles and endless shiny blond hair. We couldn't take our eyes off them, they were so cute. And as wholesome-looking as a couple of Ivory soap babies. It ain't legal, but we eavesdropped on their chatter thinking to hear nothing more hair-raising than who was taking whom to Saturday's game. Which just goes to show how wrong you can be. The gist
was this :
46T?.
I'm flunking Latin and English cold, and last year I would have been frantic. But jeeps! This year who cares?" "Yeah, doesn't everything that seemed so terrific last year just seem completely futile?" "Mmm. School and careers. And marriage! 'Member when we used to think all we had to do was get out of school, dabble around a bit, then take our pick of the horde and settle down?"
Much more in the same vein. Their whole attitude seemed to be, why not neck and drink and flunk math? The war was going to go on and on. The men were going to get fewer and more incapacitated. There wouldn't be any little vine-covered love nest for years, maybe never. This would probably be the last year that America would be America. Whereupon we left. That last we couldn't stand.
Those were a pair of pretty typical kids. Probably knitting sweaters like fiends for the Red Cross, sending brownies to innumerable camps and selling bonds every spare second they had. And simultaneously doing about
the neatest demoralization job Hitler ever pined for. This then is in the way of a spanking for all you crepe-hanging co-eds from Weehawken to Wisconsin.
Granted the war is lousy. It's messing up our lives. It's strictly no fun. But remember this. The only darn reason our brothers and cousins and beaux are in there batting is that they're very, very fond of America. They're fighting to keep it the way it is now. When they come home, they want to find things pretty much untouched by what has happened. Won't you see to it that the very things they're fighting for don't cease to exist while they're gone? Won't you promise not to change, except maybe a wee bit for the better ?
Specifically, don't lose interest in school and in getting good marks. Your education is more vital now than ever because more and more important jobs will have to be done by women, and the more you know the more useful you'll be. Study all your assignments and a little bit more. Honestly, there's comfort to be found in Caesar and Cicero. Think how many world cataclysms those two old guys have survived. Realize how many upheavals civilization can take and still stick around. Believe that there have been other girls in other eras who have felt as confused and bewildered as you, and who came out of it finer and more tolerant people.
Try to feel that every "A" you pull down is making you that much more valuable to America. Give the old books a whirl every day, won't you? {Continued on page 103)
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