Old Ike wouldn’t be lovin’ Branstad’s kid-cocooning

The difference between an 18-year-old fresh-faced freshman and a 21-year-old senior in college is the most profound I’ve experienced in a work, social or living arrangement.

The first is a boy. The second is a man.

Yet, the two coexist in American college fraternities.

Which is great for mentoring, role-modeling — and hazing, the latter being the gentleman’s term for bullying.

In 1987, a little more than a month removed from turning 18, I found myself on the third step of the dining room at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. I was a pledge, a voluntary probationary member of the fraternity, located in a four-story, ivy-covered residence hall facing Lake Michigan just north of Chicago. A long way from my native rural Iowa.

The parties at SAE, often with six or seven or 12 kegs of beers, weren’t monitored by university officials. Which was great. The visiting girls were smart. Really smart. Even better. The older guys in the house, the actives, were smooth operators, top students.

But admission to SAE came with a price.

For a full quarter, you were a pledge.

We had to memorize a book, “The Phoenix,” about the founding of our fraternity, its strange Alabama roots. We committed to quick memory the hometowns and other details about the 75 or so members of the frat and busied ourselves collecting signatures for doing various tasks in our pledge books. We studied long into the night. No one wanted to bring down the house grade-point average.

And then there was The Third Step, a spot literally three little hops up the staircase from the basement dining room.

At dinner, pledges were called randomly to stand on the third step and field questions, endure insults, gamely absorb lampooning. (One of the most skilled members of our SAE chapter at hazing us would later go on to be the creative force behind the McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It” advertising campaign. So the verbal shots lobbed at us often were exquisite.)

It’s hard to imagine soft-shelled millenials, the helicopter-parented kids of today, standing there, taking it. But as Gen-Xers, we’d not only steady ourselves on the third step, but light up cigarettes.

I guess some of the taunts hurt. But only in the way of those ephemeral day-dreamed crushes lost to time. No scars here.

I knew I was being tested on the third step. We all did.

It is one of the great ironies of my life that the fraternity — generally regarded as a premier guardian of group-think, statuesque in its celebration of rigid, unblinking conformity — gave me a sense of self-sustained by what separates me, what makes me unlike the other.

You see, you have to own those differences, embrace them, if you have any shot at a life that’s not yoked to The Great American They, the what-other-people thinkers.

Which brings us to Gov. Terry Branstad’s anti-bullying legislation.

The governor wants to expand school districts’ responsibilities from their campuses to online and off-school-grounds bullying.

No third steps in the ladder of Iowa life, says the governor.

It’s a good thing REI, the Seattle-based outdoors outfitter, is locating in the Des Moines area. Public school superintendents are going to need sleeping bags so they can camp on the porches of students. Never know when an overnight party of teens may involve insults.

School principals may just want to start moonlighting at local pizza joints, lest they let slip some opportunity to intervene as kids pepperoni their conversations with hurtful words for others.

And if you are a teacher, buy some extra iPads, find Internet service faster than anything South Korea has imagined, and turn that spare bedroom into a computer-screen-filled command center for tracking what the teenies are saying about each other in the clipped social-media parlance of the day.

For a quarter century, Branstad has preached the gospel of small government. Now, through the school districts, he wants to insert the government into our lives around the clock. He told me this himself.

“Here’s what we hear from the kids: they’re being tormented 24/7 on social media,” Branstad said in a recent interview in Jefferson. “And it’s much worse than it was years ago before we had social media. So they feel it’s a hostile environment, and they don’t feel safe at school.”

So the school day, under Branstad’s expanded regime, never ends for the administrator, the educator-policewoman. The kid never fully transitions from the government’s hands to the parents’.

Branstad promises a guardian angel for our kids. But what if a school overlooks evidence of bullying, misses a taunting tweet, an inciting Instagram shot? Will schools be liable, morally and legally, for all unkind adolescent exchanges?

“I’m extraordinarily concerned about that,” said state Rep. Chip Baltimore, the Boone Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee.

It’s a good thing the state’s most high-profile trial lawyer, Bruce Braley, isn’t in Congress. He’s free to sue schools that can’t interrupt a Twitter barrage on a kid in real time.

Why not just put all of our kids in state-funded cocoons where they hear nothing but soothing music and piped-in words of affirmation. Earned self-esteem? What’s that?

At what point do our young people learn that cruelty exists, that capitalism involves winners and losers — and that winners often bully the losers to maintain their favorable positions in the all-American split?

“Don’t fight back, we’ll do it for you!” — Is that the rallying cry of our modern nation?

The world has to look at our bullying discussion and laugh. Or cry.

The sleights suffered by your average Iowa kid don’t amount to much compared to the bumper crop of atrocities humans commit against each other in less-prosperous reaches of the globe.

Do you think Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had six brothers, ever complained to anyone about being bullied?

And what if he had? Who would he have become?

More important, who would we be today as Americans?

Speaking from experience, you have to stand on that third step. Alone. No parents. No government.

It’s the only way to truly achieve a life free from fear.