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The mere mention of the word “college” would inspire such notions of monumental achievement, advancement, wealth, and social acceptance to say the least. I didn’t always possess the feelings I have now garnered respective of my experience with college and its academia. How so very different were they at various stages in my life that I can still remember a time, as if it were yesterday, when the mere mention of the word “college” would inspire in me such notions of monumental achievement, advancement, wealth, and social acceptance to say the least. That all I could do was wish for time to elapse so that I could then enjoy the fruits of my labor and bask in the glory of my said achievements that were sure to ensue after 50 years of steadfast dedication to mankind was an understatement. This despite the notion that gaining entrance, much less belonging to such a select and elite world, was so foreign to me, my only clue as to where I hoped I could even gain entrance to it was by an endeavor to become a doctor, a senator, a lawyer, or a captain of industry. And to so much as realize this dream I would certainly have to pass through the gates of college if I were to one day hope to become one of these above mentioned professionals. This was all I had certainty of at this point in my life. Thus the idea of attending college was planted firmly in my resolution to leave all that encompassed what I knew for all that of which I didn’t. And for me to completely comprehend, understand, and accept what my life has meant for me as I reflect on it, I must also reflect on the tradition of what college academia represents to me today as well as what it once represented to me in my youth in regards who and what it once held office for in its earliest inception throughout modern times. Only by doing this can I get an accurate depiction of how it affected me throughout my life and how I have thus come to view it now.
In our own recent history, college, had been primarily funded and established by the elite of capitalism and intellectualism, and was the rite of passage for the progeny of these elite. They were to complete a course of academia first in order for them to then establish, enter, or perpetuate a legacy as well as a lifestyle of power absolutely unattainable by the common people. It was clearly for the privileged classes. Very much attached and held also in the same esteem were the select and sometimes secretive fraternities outside the curriculum that remain to this day an involute part of the organizations that serve the function of preparing the chosen few for their social roles within the hierarchy of the upper echelons of power and obligations sure to come upon completion of said academia. It was here as well that a social paradigm and business etiquette was also to be stringently learned and followed that excluded all people’s rights outside these walls of privilege and entrepreneurialism and devoid of any personal responsibility or compunction other than to those members within. 
The weak as it were, were filtered through these secretive organizations in and outside the barriers of each college so as to insure the utmost loyalty, fealty, and dedication to their cause and to each other. Attributes commonly inherited, shared, and manifested by all members of the elite classes. Handed down were not only the business tools and capital to further the wealth, power, and legacy of each family but the understanding that no one shall stand in the way of furthering the family name which was in and of itself the family’s very wealth. At a time when nations were being forged and built with the blood of the expendable masses, colleges were instructing the young how to build and wield power of their own at the expense of all who did not meet this criteria. Power, name, and wealth were the only requirements for enlistment and acceptance, one of which colleges used as a form of social caste and segregation. Prevalent in sports now is an example of its use today in college where the lack of capacity to complete its curriculum has nothing to do with the completion of academia. In short, it was an exclusive club for privileged families.
Some fifty or sixty years ago, in the name of progress, American idealism, and the notion of equal and civil rights for all of her citizens, society deemed it necessary to lift the elitist veil therefore allowing in its wake anyone willing and able to attend college to do so under the presumption of their achievability and individual capability. All of a sudden it was possible for the average Joes’s kid to sit next to the captains of industry’s kid in a college classroom. More pertinent, all of a sudden it was now possible for even me to attend college and aspire to become one of these captains. To be sure, it’s a very similar story shared by many of us out there who grew up in the Post-WW2 era in the inner city. Now every person in America, regardless of color, creed, age, religion, or socioeconomic status was entitled to attend college. Beyond that, it became quite apparent that those who were entitled or privileged in the past fell just short academically of the average Joe’s kid in many cases. And now that Academia was on a level playing field, it begged certain questions. What did college actually represent in today’s world? What was its value? Did the attainment of certified degrees of education guarantee success in the real world? Back then it did guarantee it, but now the dynamics have changed and much more than simple attendance or meritocracy is needed in order for one to achieve success on a whole. And were certain people, under the assumption of deserving allowed this privilege also but denied entrance, well, the world still needed plenty of ditch diggers and bartenders too. Though these questions however never entered my mind, they do now as I look back upon my life.
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Antipodal of today’s society that deems it so necessary in it’s assertion to have a college education in order to succeed, back then it was considered unrealistic to the point of aberrant thinking in some classes. One of which I fell head first into this category. To what end so many confusedly asked me, as if someone with such ambition were insolently trying in this manner to distance himself from his lot in life handed down to him in conjunction with everybody else who also shared the same reality. “What does a full college education guarantee you College Boy?” I remember being acerbically asked on many occasion as if I thought I were too good to share their company. College provides a foundation and the blueprint needed to learn, follow, and achieve success in a specialized field in conjunction with specific knowledge!” I would angrily reply in opposition to their protest. I even tried my best to answer their questions in a manner I would surely come to possess as my own once I graduated from college. “Hard work is all you need,” they would laughingly inform me of my delusions. True enough of what I have come to understand only after years of living. College can only be beneficial by the combined engagement and understanding of a hard work discipline, work ethic, and a fundamental desire for a feeling of completion in and of its acceptance. Is it not all this and more, and at the same time the criteria needed back then as you do now. I’ve come to understand that college provides you a map on how to read and navigate a specific world and it’s complexities as it has been surely manmade with all its designs. Academia wants you to believe that you’ve acquired all the necessary skills to become successful in the world. More than just this, society and today’s specialized work force as a whole believes that you can’t become successful until you have shared this burden of college accomplishment. Until you have learned the basic fundamentals as well as master society’s placement of you and all its demands it initiates on you. 
Whether you transcend or resolve these demands as well as the limitations set by man, machine, and all other causalities, whether rarified or not, is neither here nor there. This makes no difference, but in the end, ultimately, college graduates want to work with others who also hold bond to other graduates and understand each others plight and predictability. It’s as simple as that. But again, all these questions never entered my mind. Instead, other ideas were circulating in my young mind as I knew but had no idea at the time just what was in store for me much less what insuperable and insurmountable obstacles lay in wait. Yes, I’ve come to understand all this now. Now, fifty years later and after many years of wrestling with the “what if” factor that I so long suffered from despite all my success. But it wasn’t always so. I in fact resented it for more years than I care to admit, should truth be told. And I now propose to tell it so to cathartically rid myself of so much guilt that I’ve carried around with me for so many years. The difference being that I don’t blame college anymore but rather I do my own shortcomings and self inflicted feelings of inadequacy, self worthlessness, and lack of confidence that I’ve had to come to terms with in my life. Though I could further venture to say that I had a profound distrust of everybody and everything owing to my inconstancy and quixotism, I won’t. Being that it may just add to my self denial more than it already has.
Fifty five years ago my brother and I too were the average Joes’s kids and we lived worlds apart from any semblance of privilege and meritocracy. Our world consisted of survival one day at a time where the dreams of the youth were considered slothful machinations easily correctible with the help of my father’s leather belt. Though we never failed to be penitent after such beatings, should we falter with so much as a peccadillo, we were reminded under duress that no irregularities or deviant behaviors yet to surface would go unnoticed or unpunished by God or our parents. Ridicule often followed these harangues with the transference of guilt usually laid at the feet of both my brother and I. This aside, in all honesty, I came from a very warm and nurturing family. My parents, who worked day and night to provide for me and my brother, to be sure were always there for the both of us. In so much that if it wasn’t for the work ethic of my parents, my brother and I would surely have experienced more hand to mouth days than we already endured. Much to my mothers delight, I was a reflection of her as much as my brother was a carbon copy of my father save the strong brogue accent he was straddled with. She was caring, philanthropic, devoted, and naïve to the malevolence of the world. What she managed to see in my father who was every bit the protector and jealous husband must have been in the eye of, her, the beholder. His attitude was very much the character he portrayed as a man which was brash, abrasive, and in the least bit refined. We lived in the inner city of the Midwest, in one of the poorest districts on one of the toughest blocks in south Chicago. My parents were the son and daughter of illiterate immigrants very much like themselves who worked day and night till the skin literally fell off their fingers. My mother a maid for a well to do family that belonged to the social elite and a seamstress at night. My father, an iron worker 12 hours by day and a part time welder, gopher, or night watchmen by night. They worked themselves to death so that my brother and I could inherit the American dream once their bones were in the ground. They were proud to sacrifice themselves to the progress and future of America as well as to the happiness of us kids. This was a common held theme among the poor immigrants in those days whose sole comfort came from this justification alone. Though I was the oldest, by a year and a half, I was considered the baby who was, no doubt in their eyes, destined a premature end as I was considered weak by all standards considering our station. Much of this mentality was of course owed to my day dreaming and fondness for books, horticulture, and anatomy which was considered strange and unmanly where I came from. Ever since my brother could walk he was charged with my care anytime I was out of our parent’s reach, something of which I believe he much took to heart so as not to be looked upon as the second child. Being that in his eyes I was always going to be the favorite due to the order and rank of me being the first born. As his duty, growing up, my brother showed his propensity for pugilism by diligently taking care that no one so much as offended me or looked at me in any way suspicious to him. I clearly remember my father and brethren being banned from all the neighborhood bars anytime they appeared together even slightly inebriated. Even if only imagined to be inebriated, everyone in our neighborhood stayed clear of their way and because of it my father beamed with pride at my brother’s like-mindedness. “Let no wun evra tell you they izz betta than you Boy!” he would tell my brother who would smile at my father’s acceptance of him after knocking some one’s teeth out. “Your brother doesn’t understand so you show him, you his Papa when I’m at work Boy” he would say with a smile only they understood. This was the life I would lead I thought if I didn’t find a way out of here. You see what I haven’t told you about my parents is that I was ashamed of them. I was ashamed of their illiteracy and peasant mentality and I was going to die trying to get out of here. I remember the look in their eye when I would bring up the idea of going to college. Diverting their eyes from mine with a feigned smile that reassured me with only their look of sympathy at my ignorance for what they apparently already knew. This idea of going to college, you must understand, was not an idea many thought to be possible or even aware of in those days. No one ever talked about it, no one we know even knew someone that had ever attended college! It was for the other people that had the luxury of even entertaining such an absurdity. Such was the common held view at the time and as such my parents also shared the view that I was just another one of the forgotten who was bound by the chains of poverty. It’s to my brother who I owe the gratitude as it turns out. It was he who began to instill in my parents on his own account that the family was to work harder and find whatever means necessary for me to go and attend college. 
And again, it was he himself who formulated a plan in clandestine with my parents and left school at the age of 15 so as to go work with my father in the iron business. I never knew this nor the fact that unlike me he was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that college wouldn’t afford me a life that I could not attain at any cost should I even live to be a hundred years old. But that was of no concern to him. He had his own ideas and they didn’t include going to college. The fact that I wanted to become a doctor was all he needed to make both of our lives better. Owing to the fact that he did it for unselfish reasons, as I will explain, has been something I’ve had to reckon with my entire life. Not knowing that kids like myself were never to behold a proper education I naively saved my money too so that when high school graduation came I would have enough money to buy my books as I thought college was part of the education afforded every American kid in America. It wasn’t though at the time. But as luck would have it, it was around this time that colleges began allowing kids of unequal opportunity the chance at this education as part of a government/socially pioneered and inspired meritocracy. That this idea soon appeared as the order of the day, as opposed to the right of only privileged or elitist families to partake in, couldn’t have come any sooner or at a better time. As did so many other families of the time, who also correlated wealth and social hierarchy as a rite of only the elite, so too did they persevere to send their kids off to attain the college education now also afforded to them by chance. Along with them, I too set out for college then medical school immediately after graduating high school. Off I went after saying my goodbyes to the family, to the foreign land of a college campus which would carry me far away from that of the hopelessness and despair that life afforded me at home in my neighborhood. So I thought. Diligent and unconcerned, I should say, was my brother on the contrary. Less could he care at the time for anything other than hedonistic in quality or pleasurable in appearance. He berated me and laughed at me in his affectionate way only to deepen my ambition and resolve to become “one of their fools” as he called me. “Poor brother”, I thought as he would no doubt learn reluctantly from one of the only two other learning institutions available to us in the 50’s and 60’s, which was the military or jail. In any event whether he joined the military or got sent off to jail, I knew he wouldn’t mind as the only type of person my brother associated with were the incorrigible criminals or delinquent reprobates that also lived in the neighborhood and shared his views. He was tough where I was not. He was totally undedicated where I was fastidious. And he was mentally unstable bordering lunacy where I was the paragon of clinical and sterile sanity. I should mention that I don’t think it ever even entered my brother’s mind what his life was destined to become. He just knew it would all work out somehow. When I would ask him what he wanted to do with his life, he would always simply remark, “I don’t know. We’ll see. Maybe see the world.”, where I would rebuke him incessantly for his ignorance by saying “sound’s like a great plan Einstein but how are you going to do that, all you know how to do is fight,” where he would smile sympathetically reducing me to the smallest pieces of only my own heartbreak not his. “You just keep your eye on the prize Doc, and let me worry about the rest”, he would say where I would in return promise him the world once I graduated from medical school.
To say the least, not only did I find the curriculum and world of academia worlds apart from the one I once knew but the life I once had now vanished behind a rigid structure of social class, right, White Anglo-Idealism, and an ethos of a people I found as foreign as they did me. My presumption was that if I could survive the streets I’d come from, then medical school and the rest would a piece of cake. It wasn’t though, but what else was I going to do. Go back! Instead I put my head down as a bull does and charged forth each and every new year. And each new year of school and the real world, albeit, brought with it its own very distinct experience and new battle for me. Whether it was the division of the socio economic classes I was now a part of, or lines of socio-ethnocentrisism I was traversing, the prejudices of the elite, or the demands of the profession I had embarked on, it all bore with it a certain taste of ever increasing indignation that finally gave way to my absolute loss of altruism and compassion for the one thing I wanted to become a doctor for. And that was to help people. Indeed, it was here that I saw many a resident including myself ignore at times, if not altogether, by default and not by their reason alone, the Hippocratic Oath we swore to uphold.
As quickly as I became a doctor, I bitterly strove on past my first failed marriage, only to be comforted by my brother’s marriage where I was the best man. 
This held me together at the seams for the time being as my brother had always done since we were kids by his display of unconditional love and empathy towards me. As time went by and my practice grew I was awarded the accolades, riches, and financial independence I for so long dreamed of. And when the gratitude and approval of both my parents and my brother that I had patiently awaited for my entire life was sure to be given me, it never came. My return payment for all the sacrifices my family had made for me seemed to go unappreciated and many a time unnoticed as well. My brother always to my dismay and absolute consternation returned the checks, the gratuitous airline tickets, and the expensive bottles of wine I sent him and his wife, thanking me yet unable to accept any of it on the grounds that he didn’t want me to waste my money on extravagances as he and his wife were doing fine and of humble origins. Proving to be much more obstinate and stubborn were my parents who wouldn’t so much as budge from the place they were born in even though I had bought them a big house in the suburbs far away from all the painful memories I thought they surely suffered from. Apparently though, only the scar remained. They wouldn’t be bothered with such fussing as my mother always put it. Nor would they have anything to do with me or my second wife who they felt was embarrassed by their “humble origins” as they would so proudly put it. And she was, as it turns out, not only embarrassed of them but of me as well. There’s marriage number two! And my brother, well, no one knew exactly. At least my parents pretended not to know. He was off in some foreign land with his wife who’d surely left him by know I thought, knowing how leaky a vessel he was and the fact that he couldn’t hold much water. “Serves him right”, I placated myself knowing only too well his blatant disregard for convention or for smugly ignoring my advice of working and saving every dime so as never to have to return where and whence we came. That’s just it though. That’s the one thing about my brother as I’ve come to envy in my later years as much as I have had to reckon with it in correlation to my own life. I fought my whole life to follow a dream I knew nothing about other than the esteem others held for its office. I fought to go to college because I thought I would have a better life than the one afforded me by my parents. How naïve I was to live for tomorrow thinking it would always come whereas my brother cared less about tomorrow and lived only for today. The “what if?” never seemed to bother him as it did me. Perhaps it was the survivor in him that I only wished too often I’d had but didn’t. Knowing my sensitivity and anxieties for what I always thought would be a short lived life, he always assuaged my worries by telling me “Hey brother, we only get one shot at this so live it to its fullest each and every day!”
As time went on, life went on. It went on and on and on and on. Still, the same thing each year being that nothing really ever changed for me. Everything became as routine as the emptiness in my life. I worked, worked some more to fill the loneliness in my life, then worked some more. With it came the delivery of my new car and the purchase of a bigger house with no kids or wife of many years to occupy the rooms. Here I am a well respected doctor now in my late sixties facing retirement in a few months with golf to look forward to. I’m married, oh, that’s new. My fourth wife as it turns out. My brother’s back. He’s back from whatever adventure he was off on with the same women he married 47 years ago. Back with them are their three beautiful children I met only when they were already adults and he’s a multimillionaire several times over. Several times over! That would baffle me should this person be anyone else other than my brother. You don’t know my brother. Apparently, I don’t know him very well either. I followed every rule, where he followed none. I lived right by all normal paradigms of convention and he ignored them all. I bought everything a man can want only to be left with my toys, accolades, and the novelty of memories in my garage. He bought nothing and gained the world. At sixty seven where I now set out to see the world, he’s seen the world several times over. He’s been there, and done it as they say. He’s run with the bulls, climbed mountains, and has dove the deepest seas in the farthest reaches of the world. All I can say now, with a smile on my face that cost me my life to put it there, is what my brother told me time after time. “Who needs college? I can do all that without spending 14 years in school!!!” So who’s right me or him. I dare not ask nor answer what nay my heart can’t bear the answer to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m just thinking out loud. I’m neither bitter, nor am I angry anymore. It’s much too late for that now. Besides, I’ve come to terms with it. I’m just thinking as I often wonder, whether or not I would have been as happy as my brother should I have taken his route. Yes it’s true. I helped thousands of people get well, live healthy and happier lives, but at the cost of my own happiness. I don’t regret one second of that, but that I took so much of my own brother’s and family’s life to do it, I do regret. Was it fair to them? Was it a fair trade? For the people I helped, I’m sure one couldn’t put a price on that. Still, it’s something that I think about as the life I knew for so long is now being traded in for a new one. The only difference this time around being that I’m as unsure of anything as my brother was years ago when we were kids. And I’m perfectly happy with that. Happy for the first time in my life! Where it will take me, who knows, but I do know one thing, and this my brother taught me; - that’s to live each day like it’s my last, because it could very well be.