Tag: Friday Philosophy

Last Tuesday Bloomfield College held its yearly convocation, a salute to the beginning of a new school year…which happens around Midterm Week each year for some indiscernible reason.  Or speaker was Dr. William Librera, Presidential Research Professor of Education at Rutgers University, and the title of his presentation was Inside the Horizon.

As these things go, it was a pretty good lecture, both fairly entertaining and containing some nuggets.  There was the obligatory PowerPoint, of course, which we were told was available online, but I can’t find it.  If I could have, I would know the last part of the woman with the hyphenated last name which began with Roth-.  That would have proved helpful, since one of the major things I can recollect from the event is her thought about people being divided into two kinds:  people who segment knowledge, and people who integrate it.

Do I know what the collective intelligence is thinking right now?

There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t.

–Robert Benchley

If the discussion is elevated to the level of the Algonquin Round Table, then I’m all for it.

It has been a strange week.  Of course, it has been a strange lifetime, so maybe this past week’s strangeness may just be relative.

There is the economic bullshit, of course.  No matter what happens with that, I’m just assuming it is going to suck big green weenies.  That last time some economic policy crap actually benefited the people was when?  Does anyone have any recollection?

But maybe there are some good things to take away from that.  In hard times we sometimes need some of that.

The trouble is that even if we can find a smidgen of good being a comrade with the bad, there always seems to be more bad as a fellow traveler.

And then there is the fence turtle’s story.

Here I was, all prepared to watch Barack Obama debate an empty chair this evening.  But now news emerges that John McCain will indeed show up for the debate.

Not that the chair will seem to be significantly less empty to me, mind you.

I mean, what’s the deal?  Why is it that Republicans have made a habit of insulting my intelligence with the candidates they have nominated since…since…oh, wow….that’s a toughie.

I mean, they actually selected someone who did worse in college^* than W this time?  How can that be?  And this guy picks a box-of-rocks for his vice-presidential running mate?

[*Granted Annapolis has an honor system, which probably means that unlike W, McCain had to do his own papers, but still…]

John McCain is my definition of an empty suit of the worst kind, someone devoid of humanitarian principles or a conscience.

Well, by showing up, he’s screwing me over again

I’ve decided to suspend paying my bills…

…until this fiscal crisis is resolved.  I’ve also decided to suspend taking John McCain seriously.  I mean, I thought the present Commander-in-Thief was as much of a dork as I could imagine, but McCain has the usefulness as a bent paper straw and all the attraction of of a cup of coffee with a cigarette floating in it.

So now I’m going to have to pay those bills, it appears.

It’s been a tough week with so much financial disaster going on.  At least I suppose it is disaster for some.  Having lived five dozen years, I sort of accept this sort of thing as the periodic consequences of “business as usual.”

The cliche that comes to mind is, “The more things change, the more things stay the same.”  Which is, of course, not really true, except in a truthiness sort of way.  When things change, there is change.  The question is how we, as a society, respond to that change.  Mostly what I have observed is “kicking and screaming.”  There has certainly not been a calm and rational acceptance of change in our society, any more than most people accept substantive change in their own personal view of the world.

But sometimes we have to accept monumental change, or at least the possibility of it, in order to progress as a species.  That there have generally been some negative side-effects to accompany such change is regrettable.  I tend to thing that those negatives often result from those who cannot adjust to the change in a rational, pro-Earth (and all the beings that inhabit this planet) manner.  But the world has never really seemed interested in what I think, it seems, so maybe that’s not all that worthy a subject to pursue.

But I wonder.  I have always wondered.  There is plenty to wonder about.  “What if?”  Isn’t that what separates us from those who are not of our species?  Aren’t we just the beings whom have never been able to stop asking, “What if?”

I wandered the desert of my imagination and the jungle of my confusion this morning, peering into the nooks, looking for some hooks upon which to hang a few garlands of words, an awkward paragraph or twenty, sentences woven together, hopefully into some semblance of meaning.  And with any luck displaying the thoughts forming within, struggling to be given birth.

Being Blogiversary Day I eventually searched some of the olden times.  I discovered 51 essays tagged Friday Philosophy.  But one of them, NpK‘s Riffing off of Robyn, was rather an edition of Friday at 8.  Fifty.  I missed two weeks on the edge of the Mojave.  But the first Friday Philosophy was published before we officially opened, so maybe this is Numero Cinquenta.

Maybe not.  Counting things is an obsession, but it doesn’t rule my life any more.  That first piece after we opened to the public, as well as the first one with the graphic (which is called Occlusion, for anyone who has wondered) was The Closet.

Publishing A Transition through Poetry at Muse in the Morning has a tendency to drag me back through the sixteen years since I began my transition.  How could it not, especially since I have assigned myself the task of providing a little commentary to add flourish and some music in an attempt to evoke a mood?  

It is a time of reflection.

My brain seemed barely capable of stirring together a topic for this evening.  But that was this morning.

Time to make stone soup?  Maybe.

I had some set-ups, like buhdy’s piece about why he is a liberal, like the wholesale denigration of community activists I’ve heard about, or like even Governator Palin, but to be honest, I avoided the RNC broadcasts as much as possible.  Their message never changes.

The WeaveMothers were one and several.  The several part was not without its danger.  Getting lost in the a reality of a happentrack was an ever-present  possibility.  When that happened, sight of the larger tapestry was usually lost.

And when that happened, there was danger of the tapestry unravelling.  There was even the danger that what had already going to be happening could be forgotten, so that it would never actually ever reach the state of having happened.

They came back together determined to repair the snapped thread.  Raveling was kept to a minimum.  A dropped stitch or four would have to be picked up.  But only a few realities had ceased to exist.  The WeaveMothers mourned the consciousnesses that were still.  The Greataway would be poorer for them never having existed.

Another semester begins, to yet one more time drain the life out of multitudes of college teachers and their students.  This year begins with the periodic political campaign speech which, if it addresses education at all, displays no knowledge of life from the perspective of a college teacher.

One of the problems with being a college professor is that one is likely to be swamped with many ideas at once from time to time, which causes them not only to divide one’s time in an often futile attempt to resolve the different issues but also to consider how those issues might overlap…and why they happen to come up now, at this point in the life of a person or the history of the world.

So I’m going to carefully unwrap the twines of my reaction to the acceptance speech vis-a-vis education from another event that occurred yesterday.  More time and more thought need to go into any tirade about students who would be better served not going to college and the rest of us remodeling society so that such people could have their own form of a better life through a different vehicle than attending school not because they want to do so but because they are told to do so.  And about the amount of destruction done to educational realms when people think that the point of an education is to get a better job instead of, you know, learning something.

More time and more thought also need to go into anything written about the effects of that destruction and the destruction caused by No Child Left Behind…which has been every bit the storm Katrina was and is ongoing…on any effort to create an army of new teachers who actually have the skills and passion to teach.  The infrastructure of our education system has been neglected just as much as the infrastructure of our highways and byways…and surely for just as long, if not longer.

Dear Diary,

One way or another, I’ve managed to survive here just short of one year.

For one reason or another, someone invited me to publish here.  If nothing else, I’ve done that nearly religiously.

[Agenda:  Write enough words so that pics of pandas and wild felines can be interspersed, so that those who don’t want to read the words might be entertained and those who usually read the words aren’t disappointed.

As I wrote this morning, my brain is mostly fried.  Left to my own devices, I might have written about Diane Schroer, but I overruled myself.  Maybe someone else should do that, I thought.]

So I spent two weeks wandering in the deserts, mountains and valleys of southern California…and another family.  The difficulty of living an examined life is constant monitoring the levels of context and metacognition roiling beneath the surface of every interaction.  One fences one’s in-laws at one’s peril when one knows that ultimately to the majority of them, for one reason or another, one is not family.  I’m welcomed because they love Debbie…who they still call Linn.  That’s enough to separate us right there.

The deeper level asks, whether for good or for bad, for happy or sad:

Step one is to establish locations and state of mind.

[Note:  Contains photos.  I have tried to minimize their file size as much as possible.]

The WeaveMothers, one and several, saw the thread snap.  It whipsawed through the firmament as the tapestry of reality sagged and fragmented.  Like so many other wherewhens, the place of weakness involved the worldtime of the brighter spot.  As much as they could experience Fear, they feared another stillbirth should the loose cable strike the brightness.

And, one and several, they wondered if it didn’t seem dimmer.

The Engineer seized the braking lever suddenly and pulled with all hir might.  The giant wheels locked and a plaintive squeal proclaimed the rending of the fabric.

The Storyteller ceased singing the song.  The Listener’s head turned to watch the Passenger fall from the seat and awaken suddenly.  On the Passenger’s head there was what could have been blood…near where there could have been other scars.  Some of the Passenger’s face came away in its forelimb.

There are so many ills tainting our world.  People’s inhumanity towards one another expresses itself in so many different ways.

Pick one.  Work on it.  Make it your Cause.  Commit the rest of your life to it.  Commit to bring it to an end.  Do anything you can to advance that issue, including working on other issues…so that maybe when the time comes someone might have learned enough about you and your issues that they might actually care about them as well as their own.

What?  What was that last part?  Work on other people’s issues?  Why would anyone ever do that?  Isn’t that, like, a colossal waste of time and effort?

Actually, no.  It’s how something…anything…gets accomplished.

Down here at the bottom of the issue food chain, the only way anyone is going to notice us is if we push other people forward, people who are and issues which are obscuring our existence.

Each day I can watch him trudging home from wherever he has been.  Fortunately it is downhill from the bus stop to where he lives.  He never smiles, eyes focused on the ground a few feet in front of his pace.

Beaten down.

The world so heavy that he can’t even look up.

Shoulders sagging under the weight of the last straw, and the last straw before that… and the one before that.  A succession of so many minor beatings to the ego that he flinches reflexively at anything, everything, expecting the worst

Back bent from too many sorrows.

And you want him to rise up?

Why?  Is his life going to be better?  Tomorrow, when he rolls out of bed, is anything he interacts with going to be better than it was?  Is it worth his effort?  Does he have any effort to give?

I’ve been there, a time or two…or ten, when all one worried about was where the next bottle, or toke, or hit was coming from, anything to reach numb.  Anything more than numb was a bonus.