letters of intent

I pulled up to my parents house and parked a block away. Cars lined both sides of the street with the van and four more cars packed tightly in the driveway.  At this point the automobiles are not my problem, but they will be. Relatives from points all over collected to settle things, prepare the house for sale, disperse material things, but first manage a crowd for a funeral. The present clogged parking allows a short walk across the grown neighborhood before pushing through the front door. The weather fair for November, the house is open with no activity downstairs. I clamber up the stairs holding canes clamped to handrails clattering upward and tap across the second floor hall to my parents bedroom at the end taking up the corner of the house where some fifteen people or so are gathered inside standing around and sitting around the king size bed laden with stacks of papers, wooden boxes, tin military storage boxes with folding metal tabs to hold tin lids, military awards, records, jewelry, coins, odds and ends and the people, all relatives, are culling my parent's most personal things. Intimate things splayed on their bed in large disarray. The sight of it depresses me while the sight of them all heartens me. I did not know about any of this stuff. They heard me coming. They are somber but energized and eager to stay busy.  My older brother is ready for me on the opposite side of the bed and the pile and he is particularly interested in having me know about something they all had just dug out. A letter. 

Barry read the letter aloud to everyone standing there silently while looking up at me. All in the room are already familiar with it. They like hearing it again and the situation they're making has the feel of ambush. They found the letter earlier this morning. It is a simple thank you note addressed to my aunt, my mum's younger sister. You must say that it is odd for my parents to have it. Odd for my parents to save the letter. It's altogether odd. I'm puzzled. This is of the type paperwork I've been dealing with for years before they arrived at this point and I am quite tired of all of it.  They are enjoying my bemusement somehow, exchanging coy looks. They're like that. They prefer 'you're on the spot' type joking with me. 

The letter thanks my aunt for a small financial gift and tells her what will be done with it. The writer skips past the immediate gift and reaches directly to her heart by recounting previous points of connection. Intensely personal, the writer tells her she singularly maintained a touching intimacy while growing up no matter the distance or time between contact and the love in that effort maintained throughout is transmitted strongly and cherished. Without saying she is the favorite aunt the writer sweetly has her understand that she is a favorite relative. It sounded like something an old man would write, honestly it does, to another old person with much between them. Diplomatic. Mature. Impressive. But, so what. There was nothing reaching or maudlin or faux about it. It was just so sweet and spot on, to the point and  a bit beyond, mature. It hit all the right notes just so. All that in a short thank you note that handled the recipient like a tender bird and it worked as genuine thank you.  But why do my parents have Aunt Betty Lou's thank you note? Why save it for so long? The whole room was enjoying this quiz. 

"Because you wrote it, Dummkopf. Don't you recognize it?"

"The style was dropped some six transfusions ago." 

"Well it blew Betty Lou away so hard she sent it back to Mum to show her what her what her son wrote. You."

"Oh."

"And it blew Mum and Dad away they saved it with all this other stuff." 

"Oh .. So. You see they save everything."

Apparently it impresses the folks in the room too. All of them. My sister is crying again. She's a mess. My other sister  is beaming like she caught me at something, "See? See? See?" See what?  I really don't see. I just flat don't see. Break it down for me Sister, because it is still a mystery to me why a simple thank you note will circle back across the country like this. It's weird and akin to surveillance and I don't like it. The whole checking up on my activities all the time and discussing their findings  like this bugs me. Although I don't recall writing and sending it, still a private thing to a specific person, and now everyone knows what I said and did way back then as a teen four houses before this one, and seven houses ago for me and a million projects ago. They saved the strangest things but how they even had their hands on that note is strange, it had nothing to do with them, except I'm their son. As to say, look what your son did. 

That's the setup.  Now for comparison, the content of that strangely handled but straightforward and touching  thank you note that somehow surprises all those people and just knocked off by an ordinary teen without a college degree yet and not particularly clever in flyover America to the Harvard application essay of America's most highly regarded globally adored saint and my heart sinks and  not because I'm so smart, I'm not, but because all of these admirers of false idols together who make such political canonization possible are so butt-rapingly thick. 

"The reasons I have for applying to Harvard are many." 

Fuck me. It's a joke. Didn't his dad check this first? There is no first draft. This is the first draft. Just slap this on the application. 

This is our Democrat saint applying to Harvard. Tune up with this flute: "Me, me, me, meeeeeee." At the point of future world leader, presently fixed supreme among Democrat canon.  Full text here, it's short. They don't leave much room for future leaders of the world to explain their intentions on Harvard applications back then.  John Kennedy shows all the vision and understanding of a stunted little punk. This, right here, is what SJW mean by white privilege. They are looking at themselves and remarking on their own. Kennedy is having the place of somebody better. It's embarrassing.

This is an unacceptable application. Yet Kennedy is accepted. Harvard, legacy admit rate 30%. He doesn't even have to try. That means any  kid white or otherwise lucky enough to be born to Harvard alum has automatic admittance no matter how much a dipshit, parent or child, and that's how we end up with John Kennedy and all the air, fluff, feathers, mirrors and magnets and nylon filament needed for maintaing colossal myth the likes of  Camelot: the American version of myth based on the British myth about royalty and magic that is rejected outright for its absurdity and the ridiculous impulse for applying myth to a vision of American politics or about Washington being anything shiny on hill or in swamp or anywhere. But you already know all this. Here is the embarrassing proof. Back to John Boy's Harvard application and to world class leadership style of youthful Kennedy writing. 

* Harvard will give me a better liberal education.

* I always wanted to go there.

* I feel Harvard has something to offer me.

* I want to go to the same college as my dad.

* I want the enviable distinction of being a Harvard man. 

Life was simpler then. Or was it?

Legacy admissions is a distorted system. Instead of removing legacy and un-distorting colleges instead use affirmative action to distort correctively and that bend/ bend action instead of unbend action distorts further instead of correcting. It takes teams of college professors and scores of political operatives to be this destructively wrong.