I’ve never been one to follow conventional rules or advice. Or more exactly, I’ve never followed them blindly.

Early on I learned that while we need rules for the greater good, we don’t need all the rules we have. While a lot of them are enforced diligently, if not maniacally, the fact is they often serve no positive purpose, except to justify the powers that be’s existence (at least to themselves). In other words, those rules are there because … well … they’re there.

And one problem with all of them, no matter how enlightened they are, is they’re enforced erratically or arbitrarily, if at all. This is the case with being behind the wheel while on a cell phone. Yeah, sure, everyone knows it’s as dangerous as driving drunk and it’s illegal to boot. But, still, they do it. And they’ll continue to do it, and continue to cause wrecks, deaths and disablement, till someone (like the cops) decide to enforce it, the chances of which are the same as me winning a Nobel Prize.

Women and the vote are a perfect example. American women weren’t allowed to vote till 1920. And why weren’t they? Because they weren’t, that’s why. And that was so justifiable that women who protested their lack of vote (a constitutional right) were often arrested and tossed in jail. At this distant remove it seems impossible such things happened, but they did, and it’s a fine object lesson to keep in mind.

The first election I could vote in was 1968 because the voting age then was 21. With the draft and Vietnam in full swing, a 21 voting age was a sore point, at the very least. Beyond the draft, 18-year-olds could be prosecuted as adults — they just couldn’t vote as them. The 26th Amendment gave 18-year-olds the vote … but not without resistance. And resistance from quarters you might not expect it from.

Or should I say quarters I didn’t expect it from. I was arguing with one of my college teachers about how hypocritical it was to draft 18-year-olds without giving them any say in the matter. His answer was a classic.

“Robert, it takes brains to vote intelligently,” he sniffed. “But any idiot can fire a rifle.”

Unsurprisingly, he was never in the service.

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College daze

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Next we have the Ivory Tower of my youth, a haven for weird, arbitrary and downright stupid rules.

Among the worst were curfews. For one thing, women had them, but men didn’t. Second, the times themselves made no damned sense. On weekdays and Sunday, curfew was 11 o’clock. On Friday it was midnight, and on Saturday it was 1 a.m.

How did they arrive at these numbers?

You tell me.

Logically, all those curfews could’ve been an hour or two later, an hour or two earlier, or any fraction thereof.

And the system was enforced with court martial severity: Any late minutes were diligently recorded and when an arbitrary number of them were reached, the miscreant was put under their equivalent of house arrest.

And why did women have curfews in the first place? The stated reason was to protect them. But protect them how and when? Because nothing was protecting them before curfew. And who was protecting the girls in town … or even cared about to?

How’s about this for another bit of absurd boy-girl rules? Women were not allowed in the guys’ dorms. Period. Guys, however, could go into the girls’ dorms — but with about as many rules as having an audience with the Pope. They could be in the main lobby anytime (which always had someone on duty to make sure no one went beyond it). But they could be in the lounge, that Haven of Golden Promise with dimmed lights and padded furniture, only on Friday and Saturday nights and only from some specific hour till curfew ended. As I recall, the dorm supervisor was always on duty to make sure all hanky-panky stayed within decent bounds (at least all visible hanky panky).

Oh, Lordy Lord, the lounge! The place could be fairly labeled A Repository of Repression. The lights were low, and every available space was taken up by couples clamped in one hopeless embrace or another. Beyond that, the air was full of young love, young lust, pounding hearts, labored breaths, hopes, prayers, promises and lies.

By 1970, all those rules and restrictions disappeared, as if by magic. Of course it wasn’t due to magic, but to the increased radicalism of the time: Equal rights became a hot topic and college women not only realized they were being discriminated against, but decided to change it, which they did. Hence, curfews and dorm visitation rules got dropped like the proverbial hot potato. And not just at my college, but almost all of them.

Cynic that I am, I doubt those policies changed because the college administrators experienced enlightenment about gender discrimination. Instead, they became “enlightened” when they realized if they kept those old policies in place while other colleges ended them, enrollment at Old Siwash would take a nosedive. And if that happened, they might lose their jobs and actually have to work for a living.

Of course, given the nature of administrations and administrators, I’m sure they still had enough other ridiculous rules they could enforce to their li’l black hearts’ content.

So, ultimately, it was a happy ending for everyone — the administrators, the coeds, and the Lochinvars.

And it was certainly a happy ending for me, cuz I was no longer subject to all that college restriction and repression. Instead, I was basking in all the freedom and frolic allowed to a lowly enlisted lad in This Man’s Navy.