Arkansas Blog

What a riot! A bunch of white kids dancing for the first time ... Warwick ought to get up there with his camera. He'll need a tripod so's the camera doesn't shake too bad.

"In my week at J.B.U., I met students who had never had a drink, had never kissed a boy or a girl and had no doubt that dinosaurs and men walked the earth at the same time. But I didn't meet a soul who thought dancing was sinful."

Hahahahahaha.

The Huckster plays the music but doesn't dance. Is that the same as "but I didn't inhale"?

This crap, in part, is why Bush is in the White House (how far do ya have to go to manipulate/fool someone who believes dinosaurs and humans hung out together...and that the earth is 6 thousand years old). Not having a drink is one thing, but to make it through college without ever kissing is, well, unhealthy, undesirable and evidence of greater problems than anything dancing/sex can do to ya.

>I met students who had never had a drink, had never kissed a boy or a girl and had no doubt that dinosaurs and men walked the earth at the same time. But I didn't meet a soul who thought dancing was sinful.<

I'm sad that I'm not Kurt Vonnegut. A writer like KV would litterally have you rolling on the sofa writing about a JBU scene.
If you have ever been around Siloam Springs for more than 30 min
you can appreciate it when you hear about the dancing bit-
"Well there goes the neighborhood."

It's sad that those poor souls who have been taught that partying is evil are wasting their youth.

Drinking, smoking, ingesting substances, having sex, driving too fast, sleeping all day and partying all night, skipping class to lay in the sun and drink beer -- these are the highlights of my high school and college education. Now that I'm old and jaded with responsibilities and bills to pay, I'm glad I burnt the candle at both ends and I wouldn't change it for anything.

When I was in high school, I attended a gifted/talented program at JBU. It was about journalism. We didn't have anything scheduled for the Saturday night, we were there, so we decided to all get together on the tennis court, bring radios (boom boxes) and we'd dance.
Word of our scandalous plan got back to the JBU folks and we were told that anyone dancing on campus would be sent HOME. Note, the program was not sponsored by JBU; it was sponsored by the AR Dept. of Education. Your tax dollars, that is. I'm not surprised to see them still stuck in the 19th century.

Feeble minds.

Can you posters' talk MORE out of both side of your mouths? Most of you post in this site demanding freedom of individual rights but I guess they have to match your viewpoints or they are idiots. So what if these young people feel it's important to live by a certain code or moral behavior? Just because they are not spending their youth living like you did, you have to make fun and degrade them. I didn't live that way in my youth but in today's society, with sex, drugs, booze, etc. being almost forced on young people, it is impressive to hear some can make choices that probably are healthy for them in the long run. There would be no need for teenage abortions if there was no teenage sex. Heck, I got out of my teens without having sex and with AIDS and STDs going around today, I for one would encourage more to wait as long as possible. Good for them.

Wow! I'm glad to see 'tolerance' is so prevalent among so many of your comments. I totally agree with Inside's comment. Why criticize lifestyle choices that these students, including myself - a graduate of JBU, have made. As the author says in the full NY Times article, many want to avoid the all-to-common beer- and sex-fests at public universities, and the consequences that they lead to. No judgment here, simply choices that we make just like the choices that many make to drink, smoke, and have pre-marital sex. As I see it, your snap judgments of these students' lifestyles is as repulsive as if one of these students would make a judgment of your lifestyle. You might consider that... :o)

ARK. BLOG: I agree. And I'm late to say that the article opened up a whole new, enlightening and positive outlook for me on JBU.

Very nice comments "inside" and "Jeff L". Judgmental... but what else could you expect from people who believe man and dinosaurs co-exsisted?

In my opinion America would be better off if JBU students never ever ever had sex. I'll lay in bed tonight dreaming of bunches of them living alone, growing old and never reproducing a human they can warp into the Neanderthals of tomorrow.

While I wasn't quite at whacked out....I didn't have sex until 3 days after I got married and what it got me was a late start on something that I still can't seem to feel caught up on.

Waiting until I got married seems pretty stupid to me now and when I look at my wife's aunt on husband number 7, I realize the horny old gal needed a piece of paper from the state in order to have sex. She married 6 losers just because she was horny. Tell me a little premarital sex isn't smarter than that.

But that made at least 12 lawyers very very happy and that's healthy for the Arkansas economy. I'm all for celibacy, but look how well that's working out for Catholic priests.

Most of our grandmothers had kids when they were in their mid-teens. Not something I wanted for my daughters, but what if that's what we were built for? I'm thinking if you found a 24 year old cave woman living a single life......you'd find one god-awful looking cave woman.

I was glad I was Baptist growing up. I didn't know how to dance then and I don't know how to dance now. So at least I had that excuse at every dance. Men who love dancing are light in the loafers if you ask me. No real man truly enjoys a good dance, unless it's someone else doing the dancing at them and she's on their lap looking to suck up a few stiff one dollar bills tucked in his pocket.

Let JBU be JBU for all I care. I just hate every 4 or 5 years when they do something that makes everyone in Arkansas look stupid. I spend a lot of time telling Yankees that my wife is indeed not my sister or my first cousin.......so I cringe when I spot something else that will be used against us. Makes me think of our former Gov's Moony mass marrages......That kind of help we don't need.

So let the dancing start up in the NW corner of the state and let those who want none have memories of not getting any.

Hmm, I'm perhaps too late since the thread has turned into argument over the content of the story. I wanted to say that I thought it was a particularly well-written article, even if it had been about frogs or racecars. I enjoyed the writer's style.