The Wikiness

There are moments in which we decide with huge consequence. One such decision was when I declared that I would no longer be a “Pre-Law” major in my freshman year at college. Why had I thought “Pre-Law” a good choice? 

In my Junior year of high school, my mother and I decided that a legal career would suit my strong verbal skills and, importantly, promise a better-than-average income. After I left the US in August of 1978 to spend my Senior year in Western Europe, she worked with my Guidance Counselor to select a good Pre-Law program. 

However, when I stepped off the plane at O’Hare International in July of 1979 I was not the same suburban boy who’d left. I returned a long-haired, radicalized, disillusioned young American who smoked cigarettes, sought out aesthetic and physical pleasure, and harbored critical thoughts about US Empire. Days before my return flight, in fact, I could be seen on the streets of Paris purchasing French communist pamphlets that offered a compelling, because divergent view on US hegemony. My global awareness had emerged.

In my year away, my European friends showed me the USA from their perspective. And from where they stood, our country looked not like the beautiful statue of the Republic, golden with practical idealism, but vicious and tawdry, like a violent whore. They informed me of things my American history classes left out, like decades of CIA operations supporting murderous dictatorships, the long history of imperialist capitalism, and the deceptive 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that resulted in our Vietnam War.  

Overseas, I was drawn to British punk and new wave, like The Clash, Sex Pistols, and XTC. Their songs portrayed us and our Western allies as war-mongering gangsters, and their lyrics ran in my brain on repeat: “Yankee dollar talk to the dictators of the world/In fact it’s giving orders, and you can’t afford to miss a word.”

One month before showing up as a Pre-Law major then, my mind was already, if not yet outlaw, then at least somewhat alienated from the system of laws and finance that lawyers must minister and manipulate for clients’ profit. 

My first semester of Pre-Law classes included a course in Accounting, and though I passed with a grade of C, the experience so repelled me with its narrow, arithmetic tedium that I decided: I can’t do this. The constraints of debits and credits made my brain feel claustrophobic. Though a high income and possible job security beckoned–my Bloomington, Illinois school was an important talent nursery for local business State Farm–I realized that no, tracking transactions to get to a client’s bottom line was not for me. 

And philosophically, I now knew there was a whole world out there on the brink of destruction. Did I want to give my life force to making better profit for my corporate employers? Would I make my bottom line theirs? 

That December I informed my counselor: I would now be a language major.