Finding high school friends again, and becoming friends with some classmates who were not particularly friends has been one of the greatest pleasures of Facebook for me. I’ve reconnected with a couple of dozen people from my high school, and communicating with them is something that I really enjoy. At a distance of 40 years, what crowds we were in doesn’t seem very important anymore as our youth recedes into the olden days.
But I noticed the other day that none of the Honor Students from dear old Westfield High seem to be on Facebook (maybe they’re snubbing me, although I have scanned our class pretty thoroughly – and I was pretty good friends with some of these folks back in the day). So where are they?
My guess is that they were the winners of the Social Race we all ran in, in our various ways, in that hotbed of middle-class aspiration and despair where we grew up (Westfield, NJ – home of Charles Addams). They did well in high school, they did well in college, they got good jobs and prospered in them. Now they are in senior positions in business, academia, and government.
The disruption and social openness of the Internet reminds me of that strange time in the late Sixties when the eternal verities of high school life were suspended briefly, and geeks, freaks, nerds, hoods, and jocks mingled for the only time I can remember. 1969 was a year of what Nietzsche called “the revaluation of all values”. The meritocratic acolytes of the Golden Book missed that revolution also – too busy impressing their teachers and each other and getting into Harvard.
We (the Boomers) went on to become the “Greed is Good” generation, our naive idealism somehow warped into corrosive cynicism. We destroyed the virtues that make a civil society work: service, forbearance, modesty, generosity and sense of proportion.
Let’s hope the Internet revolution turns out better than the Sixties one did.
Got any other ideas about where the missing honor students are?
think this is our vic bonic?
https://qa.jigsaw.com/scid21004307/victor_bonic.xhtml
these have been my thoughts, too. i often wonder who among us became wildly successful in our chosen fields (other than marilyn lange). who in particular are you thinking of – vic occurred to me as he was a 1600 sat guy. dick haney in my class is someone I looked for – drew ruotolo was another – but he died very young after starting a promising legal and political career in westfield. who were the really smart ones among us? I was clearly not one of them – i was such an outlier, and still am.
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ’0 which is not a hashcash value.
I was thinking of the ap english crowd in my class that I hung out with during junior high & gradually moved out of during high school. I joined up with the rest of the “left behinds of the great society”. I was conflicted about this, of course. My family had typical aspirations for their children in that time and place, and two of my brothers went to Yale. I, of course, was a problem child who did not fit in well.
Vic was a very smart guy, but not one of the people I was thinking of. I will name names in a private communication, but just think of Frank Scott’s honors English classes and you’ll get the picture. Never seen one of those folks in Social Media land; I think they’re too busy destroying the republic to bother.