"I think, like a lot of other people who have been in the service, you'd been delayed in what you were doing. You wanted to catch up and the best way to catch up was to move as fast as you could toward a degree"
About this Quote
Evans is naming a postwar ache without dressing it up: the sense that military service doesn’t just interrupt your life, it reroutes it, then hands you back a calendar that no longer matches your peers’. The sentence is built on a quiet solidarity - “like a lot of other people” - that turns an individual ambition into a generational pattern. It’s not romance or heroism; it’s backlog.
The intent is pragmatic, almost managerial. “Delayed” is a soft word for years lost to orders, deployments, and institutional time, yet that understatement is the point. Politicians often launder harsh realities into neutral phrasing to make them legible to policy: benefits, tuition, readjustment. In the mid-century American context - the GI Bill era, mass college enrollment, the transformation of universities into engines of social mobility - “a degree” isn’t just education. It’s reentry paperwork for the middle class.
Subtext: speed becomes virtue. “Catch up” and “move as fast as you could” recast learning as acceleration, not exploration. That’s the psychological hangover of service: urgency, mission orientation, the feeling that you’re behind even when you’re finally free to choose. Evans, as a politician of that generation, is also defending the legitimacy of veterans’ fast-tracked ambitions against any suspicion they’re “rushing” or gaming the system. He frames it as necessity, not entitlement: the degree is the shortest route back to a life that kept moving without you.
The intent is pragmatic, almost managerial. “Delayed” is a soft word for years lost to orders, deployments, and institutional time, yet that understatement is the point. Politicians often launder harsh realities into neutral phrasing to make them legible to policy: benefits, tuition, readjustment. In the mid-century American context - the GI Bill era, mass college enrollment, the transformation of universities into engines of social mobility - “a degree” isn’t just education. It’s reentry paperwork for the middle class.
Subtext: speed becomes virtue. “Catch up” and “move as fast as you could” recast learning as acceleration, not exploration. That’s the psychological hangover of service: urgency, mission orientation, the feeling that you’re behind even when you’re finally free to choose. Evans, as a politician of that generation, is also defending the legitimacy of veterans’ fast-tracked ambitions against any suspicion they’re “rushing” or gaming the system. He frames it as necessity, not entitlement: the degree is the shortest route back to a life that kept moving without you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Study Motivation |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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