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 I went through several hundred writing portfolios to toss those which were outdated for my obligatory storage.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

wishful thinking

And farewell to all that.I'm getting over the deliberate act of wishful thinking and it feels like a good fit to try on the robe of reality. I used to think that a regime change in the United States would salve our ills, but I've come to realize that this isn't so.

The current US fiscal crisis will be with us for quite awhile, as we have for too long depended on a single bubble (now it's housing and eight years ago it was the dot.com), and bubbles always burst, especially when we hold our breaths just long enough to hopefully get past an upswing with something to hold in our hands.

I have nothing to hold after this bubble, except to welcome my fellow Americans into my own reduced living condition. All the wishing for a better fortune has not made it happen, but at least I stopped worrying. It's actually time to start feeling good. Like Janis Joplin said in her song: "feelin' good's anther word for nothin' left to lose".

When all the dust settles we'll be different, but still fully human, and maybe even better people.

the content of your character

This was part of a line from Martin Luther King's Letter From Birmingham Jail. He actually said he longed for the day when his children and grandchildren would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

We have a great example of just this just now. We have a man of color running for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he has revealed the content of his character. This is exactly what my resume book addresses. What on earth have you and I done, what do we stand for, what words of courage and imagination do we use every day to become more fully human, to edge just a tiny bit closer to the truth, to earn our "living" with the level of dignity we so long to deserve?

Since Senator Obama's brilliant and subtle speech, I have become more outspoken, more willing to say what can't be said for fear of offending, more willing to stand in my own truth and let it be that someone will get a nose out of joint. Thank you, Senator. This bloody battle with the Senator from New York might be worth it, if only a few people start to speak up about the hidden fever of racial tension we still experience in the US.

Race and America

If you read the blogs you can hear every kind of opinion imaginable about the Obama speech. Most open-minded people who actually saw and heard the speech in toto praise the speaker for bringing the subject up in such a context of clarity and fairness.

What I liked about the speech (I sat through it all) was the sheer eloquence and courage of explaining something most of us fear to discuss among mixed groups (mixed races). After all, the laws protect all minorities (except gays), so end of story. But there is still de facto racism in all areas of the country and it's high time this disparity is addressed.

I like having this conversation. I teach college writing in a major university in the Northeast, and I was given the chance to design a subject matter focused course. I chose to teach the writings of prominent black authors of the 20th century. Having spent my early years in the south prior to the civil rights movement, I grew up being conscious of race as a permeating issue right beneath the surface, all the new laws notwithstanding. But my teenage students don't resonate with racism until we get deeply into writing about their raw observations. What I see in them is an obvious generational divide. Some of my generation, the same as of their parents and grandparents, still harbors white resentment. Their generation (everyone up to about 35) has no harbor at all. They grew up with mixed races and many of them, at least superficially, see a benevolent racially mixed atmosphere everywhere they look. But when they look more deeply, they see what's still there: Your advantage is at my expense and creates my disadvantage.

This is the most telling aspect of the speech. Until we have the conversation that mutualizes our understanding, we will not become as a nation a true melting pot and appreciate that we are in this together. We have nothing to gain from emotional distancing.

Prayer and gaming the system

Sometimes I just don't want to pray. It boils down to wanting to keep myself responsible for living a life in right action and not leaning on a god to bail me out of my own "soup". I just don't want a rescue unless I deserve it, like I don't want my parents to get me out of trouble.

Perhaps the operative word is deserve. If we don't deserve good fortune, it seems that we'll find ways to avoid it. It's like having an attitude that acts as an invisible wall. But what if one has an attitude that is so undeserving that neither god nor man can enter and expand one's soul? That's not self-reliance: that's an upside down ego tanked in the detritus of low self-esteem. So then it comes down to this: if you're feeling blue, go ahead and ask for help: god is used to it. Maybe it's those moments of low self-esteem that are deliberately put there as a reminder to be humble and ask for help.

Mostly, I don't want to pray until it gets really bad; but maybe the god of my understanding is still there, still listening, even when times are good, even when I feel balanced and in sync, and maybe the prayers then are simple conversations, even gratitudes!!