226. On Monday, November 5, 1979 the headline in The Observer with this cartoon was “In Tehran Angry Mob Storms USA Embassy.” Americans were now hostages in Iran. Within days, many of our classmates in Rome got phone calls. (International phone calls were rare things in those days.) “Are you OK?” “Do you want to come home?” We were all thinking, “Hey, we are in Rome. We’re fine.” And we were. But the rest of our year abroad in Europe, anti-American sentiment was much more apparent. One classmate even sewed a Canadian flag on his backpack.
227. In the “news in brief” section of The Observer, there was a notice on the death of Al Capp, the creator of L’il Abner. Capp was one of my cartoonist heroes.
228. This series of cartoons were the results of my musings about what uber-Christians might think of ND students and what people coming onto the Notre Dame campus to proselytize were expecting to achieve.
229. As I noted in the Molarity special in the Summer 2000 issue of Notre Dame Magazine, I always appreciated the diversity of the Notre Dame student body – you get to meet Catholics from all over the United States. And yet, like cars on a highway, none of us were being Catholic at the same speed. I suspect that many Domers did not take advantage of the opportunity to deepen their faith, deepen their knowledge of their faith and deepen their practice of their faith. I suspect at times, we were just behaving like college kids.
230. My empathy to those who struggle with alcohol or drug addiction was heightened by my inability to resist the temptation of spending a couple of bucks on a late night food sales pizza.
See the first five classic strips. Check back monthly for more classic Molarity strips. Molarity Redux, the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends, also is posted monthly. For those new strips, check out the cartoon archives.