The Man From Hope, Redux

From a letter in yesterday's DH bashing Obama and supporting McCain:

“Hope” and “change” are just stupid slogans that mean nothing!

How dare Barack Obama challenge the narrative of fear. How dare he.

I can't stop laughing at that line. I want to make it a masthead somewhere, though I like my current one better.

It reminds of this post, wherein I noted the following: "Specifically, by attacking Obama's platform in such a way, people are implicitly suggesting that we can't hope for a better future, that we don't have the capacity to work together to solve problems."

You know, Hering was on vacation last week. And come Monday, there were nothing but unhinged letters. Coincidence? I hope so.

Must be that time of the year

Courtesy of Jill at Feministe (I think), this commencement speech given by Samantha Power. My favorite bit:

Fourth, find friends who have your back. Last weekend I attended a conference in honor of a Nobel Prize winning Princeton psychologist named Danny Kahneman. Kahneman is a remarkable scholar who has done groundbreaking experiments which showed the ways in which humans are not as rational as had long been assumed. At the conference, which celebrated his retirement, lawyers, economists, and psychologists got up to present work that had been galvanized or influenced by his theories. The day was a tour de force, a monument to the kind of impact one man and his ideas can have on the world. At the end of the day Kahneman was asked what he was most likely to be remembered for. The audience hushed in anticipation. Here Kahneman would elevate one of his many theories above the rest. Posterity would record which experimental research the great Kahneman himself thought most landmark. "The one thing that I'm sure of," he said, "is that I'll be forgotten." But he was next asked the source of his nearly unrivalled professional success. Again the scholars in the room waited expectantly. This time, he gave them a response they could take home, answering, "my choice of friends."

The beauty of this is that, while much in this life is beyond our control, all of us hold the power to choose our friends. We can each be a Nobel prize winner at friendship. None of us are perfect friends always, but one way to think about friendship is in terms of carefulness. Be careful with those you love. And surround yourself with people who are careful with you. A good friend of mine devised a rather taxing standard for love and friendship - and a grim one too - "who would you want to become a refugee with?" If your neighborhood were hit by Hurricane Katrina, or Cyclone Nargis, who would have your back? Look around you today. Your parents have your back, your siblings have your back, your closest friends have your back. Keep it that way. And be sure they know you have theirs.

Lebanon Truth on Education Leads to The Big Questions

Of all the things LT has written, this is my favorite (beating out even this):

Can we change how the world views those who are educated and those who are not? No, even if we thought it was the right thing to do, we lack that power. But what we can do is tell these kids the same things that African-Americans told their kids. It isn't fair, but it is the only game in town. So we expect you to fight every inch of the way and educate yourselves to your utmost ability, every day, every way. And then we expect you to go out into that big, wonderful, scary, unfair world, make something of yourselves, whether you do it here or thousands of miles from here. But don't you ever be ashamed of where you came from. And don't you ever forget what you owe to this community. And don't you ever think that you don't have to pay it forward. [emphasis added]

1. I disagree with that first sentence, just a bit - not only can we change how the world views education, we ought to and need to. It's just that it's a much larger, and longer, struggle.

One thing we can do is teach others about the injustices of the world and allow their own moral compasses to guide their responses.

2. The above paragraph also reminds me of this top ten pet peeve regarding education: "The widespread belief among middle class parents that their child must get into a well known college or they won't be as successful in life."

While I think that's related to the perspective illustrated by LT's paragraph, I - and I cannot stress this enough - do not think the two are synonymous. In other words, LT's exhortation - to engage with the world - does not require attending college.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, it raises the question of how we define 'successful'. I've struggled with that for years, especially in relation to my peers (both defining myself against them and watching how we each define it for ourselves). A friend of mine passed on what turned out to be what I consider a very important definition a few years ago. He said that rather than ask people what they were doing for work, or if they had kids, or how much money they made, or if they went to college - all traditional measures of success - that what was important was whether or not they were happy - and I don't mean on a superficial, false-consciousness sort of level. I mean happiness in the Classic Greek Philosopher/Dead White Guy sense, happiness as the result of achieving one's definition of the good life.

This definition of happiness allows for the inclusion of a much greater part of the whole of the human experience (and it allows each person to define it for themselves, which I think is absolutely essential, messy as though it may be on the societal level). I think it's important that people - including those who happen to be students - are not saddled with a definition of happiness that is impossible to live up to (like going to college or making millions of dollars). Doing so is a recipe for unhappiness, frankly (see the rapidly increasing number of housing foreclosures and missed credit card payments).

All this, of course, is another way of saying that the process, the means, the road you take on the way to your destination - all of these are as important, if not more important, than the destination itself. Lord knows that what was important for me was not the degree in my hand (it's sitting on my bookshelf between texts gathering dust) but what I'd just spent the last five years doing (which determined who I am in no small part).

Note: Careful readers will note that I very rarely come straight out and tell people what to think/do. It just feels wrong. In this case, I will make an exception:

Anyone who is hell-bent on seeing their children succeed by any definition would do well to remember that.

3. LT's paragraph also raises the questions of what obligations we (teachers, parents, adults in general) should be placing on students. This is a very touchy question for me, since I have a pretty intense dislike of obligating others for any reason (obligating others being set in opposition to freely assuming responsibility). In fact, that might be one of the reasons I always had trouble try to enforce any sort of "make students do their work" rule or guideline when subbing: While I can endeavor to help a student see the consequences and benefits of doing/not doing their work, I cannot (and have/had no desire to) make students do anything.

However, as long as obligating others is a factor, then we could do worse than asking students to actively engage with the world around them.

It feels like there is more to say about this, but it's not coming at the moment, so I'm just going to throw this out there.

Pretentious Intellectual Honesty

I hate this, but I think I hate it because I agree with the sentiment and see myself falling short:

Perhaps people will think I’m too optimistic. But this is for certain: these things can’t be true if no one takes the chance of believing they’re true. Because if we don’t believe they are true, we won’t act as though they’re true. And if we don’t act as though they’re true, they can’t come true. That’s why realism does little but protect the status quo.

Being optimistic, on the other hand, is the most radical political act there is.

SiCKO and Hope

From Amanda Marcotte's review of the new Moore film:

And it occurred to me that the nightmare scenarios conservatives spin when arguing against universal health care are all effective because they are telling people stories of what we already have.

The fear of long wait times in E.R. is one we understand, because we have those long wait times, due in large part to the fact that so many uninsured people put off getting care until they’re in critical condition and have to be rushed to the hospital. We cringe to hear tales of being denied the doctor of your choice, because we all know what it’s like to have the HMO make you jump through 15 different loops to see the doctor you want,a specialist, because they’re hoping you’ll just give up going at all. (I’ve not had that problem, but I know plenty of people who have.) We shudder in fear to hear these stories of a bureaucracy gone mad, because it’s our reality, and the fear of it shuts down our thought processes so we’re unwilling to even look for a cure for our problems. And it’s this conundrum that Moore attacks, driving home the point that the right wing noise machine has managed to convince a lot of the public that the cure for the problem is the problem itself. Sure, the movie has a simple, straightforward message. But that’s exactly what the health care debate needs after all the right wing noise machine has done to confuse the issue.

I think she makes a damn good point. Furthermore, I think this point is generalizable toward many 'anti' sort of arguments. Do you fear the specter of Communism or Socialism because someone's told you the state will exert control over your life in an entirely undesired way? I have news for you: the state does that already, you're just used to it - it's comfortable and familiar by now, so you don't give a second thought to the idea that the way things are now is maybe, just maybe, not all that great.

Are you afraid of more comprehensive gun-control laws because you think it will lead to increased surveillance of your private affairs by the state? It's already happening - and it's not getting any better with a pro-gun Republican in the White House, let me tell you.

So why is the word 'hope' in the title of this post? Well, I think that the above trick only really works if people don't have a vision of a better world. If you've got nothing to compare to, or if you're resigned to 'making the best of it', then I think it's easier to believe these sort of horror stories without stopping and realizing that they bear a hell of a lot of resemblance to the world you already have - or, as Amanda says, that you are so afraid of the stories because you are intimately familiar with them already, and it's easier to pretend that what you have is good, because if you admit that where you're at - where we're all at - isn't good, then you might become obligated to do something about it.

I think some of this comes from my constantly being angry and frustrated at the state of things - I've read enough and dreamed enough to have a fairly complex idea of what I think a better world would look like, and I know we're a long ways from what's inside my head. More importantly, I know we can't get anywhere interesting without hopes, dreams, and visions, and I'm really fucking tired of hearing people denigrate the possibility of a better existence because they're too fucking scared they might have to change.

And yes, this occasionally applies to me.