Cancer, Bats and Hunger

That was the subject of three out of four articles of the Boston Globe's Op-Ed page on Monday morning, April 28th.

They were all three connected; at least I could see it today. President Nixon declared the war on cancer in 1971 and pledged 100 million for research. We've since spent 79 billion and cancer is still with us. BUT we are getting somewhere. Score one for the American spirit.

Bats, on the other hand, are moving on to the endangered species list, particularly the Indiana bat. some of you may think bats are funny looking and even scary, but they serve a vital duty: we are expecting a higher than average insect population this summer and bats feast on insects. Look for damaged crops coming from the ecological imbalance.

Finally, we address hunger (actually "we" is James Carroll in the Boston Globe, one of my favorite columnists). Our good idea of turning biofuels into a way of energizing our fuel-dependency has depleted the farm fields worldwide away from growing wheat and corn for food consumption and into plowing those fields for feeding our autos. There are food riots in Haiti, Cairo, and even Senegal.

Where does all this leave us? For me it puts perspective on almost everything I do. If billions on research hasn't solved the cancer crisis, maybe prevention puts a dent in some of it. The death of bats by a "thousand tiny cuts" can be stemmed by legislation fighting against land clearing for timber (which feeds our over-dependence on paper). And then we come to hunger.

Next Sunday in Boston we have the Walk for Hunger. There were half a million hungry people officially registered in Massachusetts for 2007. I'm never hungry for long. I have my sneakers ready.

Ethics and the college student of the 21st C

I wrote recently how education is a spiritual pursuit, a way to uplift the spirit and inspire hope and creativity, to change the world.

Yesterday I went down to my university to pack up for the end of Spring Semester . I went through several hundred writing portfolios to toss those which were outdated for my obligatory storage. We are asked to keep student writing portfolios for one academic year. After that they can be tossed. I decided to take a few home, blank out their names and use snippets of their text to teach other students, both in a university setting as well as in business applications.

I actually kept about two dozen portfolios and gave each one a title for easy access.I put the industry or category titles in alphabetical order. what surprised me was the three titles starting with ethics. There were other portfolios I did not keep that dealt with the right and wrongs of things, subjects which might not be titled ethics, but certainly skewed in that direction. I mused on the way home how this is important to this generation. We boomers fought against the Viet Nam War.These millennials fight against an enemy as fierce as any on the American landscape. No wonder they're going for Barack Obama.

Education

I believe education is a spiritual pursuit. As a nod to all the blog reading I do, here's a good quote from William Ayers, the controversial ex-Weatherman you've been hearing about related to Barack Obama. I think the guy is smart:


"The drama of education is always a narrative of transformation. Act I is life as we find it—the given, the known or the received, the settled and the status quo. Act II is the fireworks, the moment of upheaval and dissonance, the experience of discovery and surprise, the energy of remodeling and refashioning.

Act III is the achievement of an altered angle of regard, new ways of knowing and behaving, a new way of seeing and being.

Act III, of course, will necessarily be recast in some future educational encounter as a new Act I.

This is the fundamental message of the teacher: You can change your life. Wherever you’ve been, whatever you’ve done, the teacher invites you to build on all that you are, and to begin again. There is always something more to do, more to learn and know, more to experience and accomplish. You must change your life, and if you will, you can change your world.

This sense of opportunity and renewal—for individuals, for whole communities and societies—is at the heart of all teaching; it constitutes the ineffable magic drawing us back to the classroom and into the school again and again. Education, no matter where or when it takes place, enables people to become more powerfully and self-consciously alive; it embraces as principle and overarching purpose the aspiration of people to become more fully human; it impels us toward further knowledge, enlightenment, and human community, toward liberation. Education, at its best, is an enterprise that helps human beings reach the full measure of their humanity".

William Ayers website, April 2008