My sons play in the rain. Not just a few sprinkles, either, but the hearty, soak-your-clothes kind: they continue building forts and swinging pop flies even as their clothes hang heavy with rain water. Just a year ago, this would have bothered them—most likely because they were unused to it—but since we have moved to Nashville and enrolled them in our local Waldorf school, they are required to spend large amounts of their school time outside, no matter what the weather holds. Now they downright enjoy soaking rain. I look out the kitchen window and watch them, at nine and six years old, running, falling, throwing, jumping fearlessly, befriending the pouring rain.

Folks have been predictably misty-eyed lately over the outpouring of support for Karen Klein, the 68-year old bus monitor who was taunted by 7th grade boys in Greece, New York. Within a week, more than half a million dollars was raised from outraged and sympathetic well-wishers who wanted to “send this woman on a vacation,” and the total money amount continues to climb. Anderson Cooper reports that Southwest Airlines will foot the bill for Klein and nine of her friends and/or family members to enjoy a 3-day trip to Disneyland. Klein is also talking about finally being able to consider retirement.

I should be in school right now, steeling my ear canals against a six-hour onslaught of Finnish verb conjugation, suffixal agglutination, and phonemic molestation. While there, I’d watch the sky go from black to leaden to wan and back again. I’d pour coffee in one end of my body and drain it out the other. I’d envy the reindeer begging for alms outside the nearby train station. I’d weep.

But I couldn’t do it today. I just couldn’t be around humans.

I have spent most of my life avoiding my own species, and for the most part have done a damn good job. And as I explained about a year ago when I started this Spectacular Exploration of Life in the Sub-Arctic Wonderland of Suburban Finland, this country is among the best for writers and loners. But when impelled into taking an intensive language course whose basic premise is being able to communicate with other human beings, introverts and brooders like me are going to suffer.

This is not to say that my classmates are annoying, difficult, or weird. Okay, they are, but that isn’t the problem. The problem is that they are nice people. And it makes me be nice in return. And that in turn makes me reconsider who I think I am, or once was. Because the old me would have gone into Finnish school and sneered and slumped and groaned audibly. I would have been aggravated by the talkative ones, irked by the quiet and contemplative ones, and chafed by the funnier, wittier ones.

But I guess I’ve finally grown up. Or maybe I’m getting soft. Perhaps it has something to do with living in a country where warships are used primarily for breaking holes in the ice for baby whales.

 

Not so long ago I would have gone out of my way to avoid, for example, my 26-year-old Albanian classmate Marino.

Fluent in a handful of languages, Marino is a gregarious free agent, migrating fluidly from one clique to the next according the moment’s whim. He’s not afraid of anything, including embarrassing himself, and he’s the type of person who says he will die for his friends or family. While I’m not sure I’ve achieved Die For status, he makes me at least feel like he would jump in front of a rabid polar bear if I was in danger.

That is, if he doesn’t beat me to a pulp first. The guy is downright mercurial, and so unlike me it’s funny: he’s one of those Euro-dudes who spikes his hair and wears shirts that pinch his biceps and dons droopy sunglasses with gold earpieces. He has no qualms about picking up a female classmate by her arms and carrying her out of the room, nor about body slamming me against the chalkboard. If we weren’t forced to be in the same room (and if he weren’t blowing me kisses every few minutes), I never would have even noticed him.

Not only is Marino a people person, he’s the type whose skin will fall off if he doesn’t rub up against someone approximately once an hour. We often bristle at his tendency to herd us, shush us, or make us sit on his knee, but he means no harm. He’s like a muscular, pentalingual Santa Claus. And although none of his attempts to get the entire class into a “disco” has yet materialized, with enough time he’ll probably wear us down. In which case he can collect our bones and prop them up on bar stools.

Marino’s a great guy. (Now get off my lap.)

 

On the far, quiet, intriguing end of the spectrum is my Russian comrade, Lena.

Lena’s kind of an enigma. Her number one complaint about Finland is that its people are cold and distant, which is funny since that’s the number one complaint about her. But that’s also her charm. And there would have been a time in my life when I would despise her for such aloofness, but the new (older) me doesn’t. While other men in my school cower in her midst, I simply don’t find her intimidating. I’m far too curious about Russia and Putin and candles made from milk and sugar during Perestroika to not have the “sisu” to talk to her.

If these other dudes would (literally) stop beating their chests and try to talk to Lena like a human, they’d find that she laughs easily, flashes a sinister smile at the oddest moments, and for someone who does some modeling sure eats a shitload of candy.

 

Understandably, Marino and Lena do not get along (though they both have a penchant for argyle sweaters). And that’s what’s so rad about my school. Everyone is so unlike everyone else. It’s easily one of the most heterogeneous places in the whole country. I sit next to a Mexican and an Estonian, and across from an Egyptian and a Filipino.

And a couple seats over is my friend Aziz, from Kurdistan.

Aziz is a wonderfully crazy son of a gun. He likes to takes photos with a cell phone that has no camera, simply because he enjoys seeing people directing their happiness his way. He passes silly notes during class, fills us in on the best and worst of Helsinki Slang, and roams the hallways looking for smoking partners. But not far beneath his friendliness and antics lie strata of profound anger and melancholy.

A former lawyer and journalist, Aziz and his family and allies have fought an oppressive regime in his native country. Who exactly was he fighting? I don’t really know. Not only because Aziz’s response is confusing, but because he himself doesn’t really know. “The power behind the power,” he tells me. “Maybe God.”

Aziz and I are the same age. But while I was a 13-year old drinking Sunkist and getting sunburns on my impressive belly, Aziz was being arrested and beaten for selling a book written in his native language (forbidden by the Turkish government). At one point he was shot in the leg, and his brother was recently released from a stint in prison. When I was playing with cap guns, he was taking aim at enemy soldiers.

I once sat next to Aziz for two weeks, and while it was nearly impossible to get any work done, they were by far the best weeks of this endless language course. He shared his tea with me, brought me spices from home, and made me laugh so hard I wet my thermal undies.

While Aziz takes life in Finland very seriously, he also considers its safety and contentment an illusion. For him, he says like a well-traveled Buddhist, suffering is truth. The people of Kurdistan are not free, so he is not free. I do not think Aziz will ever know true happiness. His guilt will not allow him to.

I don’t have anything funny to say about that. I’m just lucky to have met Aziz.

 

A few seats away is Xavier, from Nicaragua.

After a couple of attempts, Xavier is now determined to master Finnish (good luck, man), find a job, and make enough money to return to Nicaragua and open a restaurant on the beach. He wants time to paint, to spend time with his children (back in Nicaragua), and to chill the fuck out.

Xavier doesn’t show up to class for long stretches of time. It’s always of a joy and a relief when he returns, since his infectious smile and I-don’t-give-a-shit attitude is often the only thing that brightens up a Finnish classroom in the bleak heart of winter.  His slacker persona reminds me of the stoner-jocks who dominated my high school years, only this time around I don’t get stuffed in my locker. Not only because we don’t have lockers, but because Xavier’s a wise and conscientious soul. After a particularly life-changing episode while sky diving (in which an inoperative chute resulted in numerous broken bones), he abstains from any sort of destructive thought.

Like I said, he’s infectious. The guy exudes positivity like a salve. Just look at his visions:

 

 

I most relate to Xavier: neither of us wants to be corralled into a cubicle, to have a boss, to let our talents and skills evaporate by the minute. We’re also both struggling. Our dreams are huge and vivid, and not yet realized. We both hope that something changes for us in Finland, but right now we’re mostly just focused on writing complete sentences in a language that sounds like a violently protracted vomit session.

 

Anyway, I’ll be back in class on Monday. Marino will wrap his arms around me and bend my spine in the wrong direction. Aziz will give me a fist bump. Lena will probably not look up from her fancy phone. Xavier, if he shows up, will give me a smile. Then we’ll take off our coats and conjugate.

 

Curbside at the ruined high school, my fingers hesitate at the door handle.

“It’s okay,” my grandmother, sitting beside me, says, “everyone else has been taking pictures.”

With a big inhale, camera in my hands, I’m out on the street, then in the grass, in my wedge-heeled sandals, stepping over gnarled strips of metal. I’m still holding my breath as I find the school in the camera’s lens, twisting to focus on its row of classrooms opened up like a smashed dollhouse. My shirt hem flaps in the wake of the traffic, and I want to announce, “Really, I’m here to help. It just doesn’t look like helping because I’m a writer and this is all I can do.” With my finger fumbling over the camera buttons, I snap five blind shots, hurry back to the driver’s side, and exhale behind the wheel.

Maybe I’m the worst person to do what I’m doing because I’m having trouble taking a simple picture to show you what I’m doing it for. I’m having trouble even telling you what I’m doing. I’ve started this story at least eight different times so far, and none of them began here.

At least one of them began here:

* * *

I drive into Joplin, Missouri from a nearby airport. Seven weeks after the massive F-5 tornado, the only indications along the periphery of the city that anything has happened here are the signs directing volunteers to the college and the excess of dump trucks hauling debris away from Range Line Road. The devastation registers slowly, piecemeal, a little at a time. The signs. The trucks. The insurance-company trailer in the grocery store parking lot. The glimpse through the arch of the train bridge over Connecticut Street of trees stripped down to jagged black lightning cracks low on the wide-open horizon.

The brick façade of my great-aunt’s house sits gaping somewhere in that stretch of ruins. She and her husband had run from room to room as the roof had peeled away over their heads, the open sky chasing them. Neighbors pulled them free and drove them to their daughter’s home in nearby Springfield.

On one side of the tracks, complete destruction. On the other, my grandparent’s home with its battered roof and uprooted trees. I don’t wait for them to answer the door when the lit doorbell chimes under my fingertip. I go right in, cross the living room to the kitchen, and hug my grandmother.

This is the other thing I don’t want to tell you because there are 159 who’ve died, 2000 businesses and homes destroyed, people who’ve lost everything, and here I am hugging my grandmother in a house left whole, right on the edge of devastation.

* * *

But the picture’s important, and this is important so I’m just going to come right out and say it or else you won’t know why I put on my nice slacks and sandals, pack my camera in its bag, and drive with my grandmother to meet with Joplin School officials. With the help of more than a dozen authors* and Simon Smithson, I’m putting together an ebook anthology to raise money for the Joplin Schools Tornado Relief Fund. I’m a writer, and this is all I can do. What I’m not is an extrovert or a publicist, but I’m learning. Sometimes, though, I’m a journalist, so I take my notebook scrawled with questions into a middle school on the north side of Joplin where some school offices have been temporarily relocated. Eight Joplin schools have been destroyed or severely damaged by the tornado, including the only high school.

At a library table, volunteer Melanie Dolloff tells me of how she recently came across a rolled-up length of butcher paper, the sort that teachers use for decorating bulletin boards, that had been covered in the days after the tornado with tally marks and notes regarding those individuals whom officials had been able to contact along with what they’d lost, who they’d lost.

“It was heartbreaking to see that,” Melanie says.

And now they’re calling again.

A little over half of Joplin children live in poverty, according to the Joplin Bright Futures organization established to help lower the drop-out rates. The challenges for Joplin Bright Futures and the Joplin Public Schools grew exponentially after the tornado.

“We are starting over,” Melanie tells me. “We are literally starting over.”

Melanie and others have been following up with faculty, staff, and students to help assess their needs and plan for the coming school year.

“There has been a lot of disruption in their lives,” Melanie says of the kids in particular.

She tells me of one student who’d lost her eye-glasses, another who’d lost her prescription medication. The little things you don’t think of until later.

“You see kids walking around in this rubble right now,” she says. “The playgrounds are gone.”

School, though, will be starting on schedule on August 17 in the temporary locations of the mall and other area buildings with a support system of counselors in place. She tells me that statistics show post-traumatic stress disorder begins to set in three months after a traumatic event.

“That’s one week after the start of school,” she adds.

I ask her what they’ll need.

Winter clothes and coats. Teaching materials. School supplies. After-school programs and extracurricular activities. “Those things the insurance checks alone can’t help rebuild,” Melanie says.

Melanie’s work with the Joplin Bright Futures organization has segued into work for the Joplin Schools Tornado Relief Fund created to meet some of those needs. I ask her how long the fund will be in place, how long will it take to rebuild.

“Years,” she says. “We don’t see the fund going away any time soon.”

My grandmother is watching us with her hands clasped and her mouth compressed in a straight line.

I say, “thank you so much for your time,” close my notebook, and then Melanie tells me we can allocate our donation for one of the extracurricular programs if we want. I’m not sure because I’m not really a fundraiser either and I have a photograph to take that I don’t feel comfortable taking. I tell her they can decide, and then I meet Danny Craven on my way out.

* * *

Here is another beginning:

With the doctor’s order for a chest x-ray folded in his pocket, my grandfather slowly lowers himself into his car and drives us to St. John’s Medical Center. Scrunched in the backseat, leaning against the door, I hold my iPhone near the glass to record for my parents what 26^th Street between my grandparent’s house and St. John’s looks like now. This stretch is only two miles of the damage out of what the National Weather Service survey team has determined to be twenty-two miles of destruction. From start to finish, this is the view along the tornado path. Rubble and the eerie twisted forks of limb-stripped trees.

My grandfather steers into a lot for the temporary tent facility of St. John’s Mercy just across from what was once the medical center and hospital.

“You can see right through it now,” my grandmother points out. “You can see the sky on the other side.”

“What’s that?” my grandfather’s voice rumbles. The bass of it vibrates along his seat-back where my fingers rest on the turn. I think he must barely hear himself. I think the loudest of sounds must be a thin whistle of air to him, slipping past the way this landscape he’s known most all of his life shifts in the car windows, looking more like the World War II photographs he has of himself camping in a bomb-battered Philippines than home.

“The building,” grandmother says.

And he nods. He can see what she means.

With the order unfolded in his hands, he squints at one sign, then another, turning circles on the asphalt radiating the summer heat. Around us, bulldozers scrape along the ground in clouds of dust. Dust everywhere. All over Joplin. My grandmother had to get prescription drops for her eyes when they’d swollen up from working outside to clean the pulverized debris blown across her lawn, from working to revive the garden in the far corner.

A man in scrubs and disposable booties crosses the lot with his hand extended. “What can I help you find today?” he asks my grandfather.

My grandmother has to repeat it closer to his ear.

“The entrance,” my grandfather says with a nod, feeling the edges of his paper.

It’s an emergency room rather than a medical center, the tent facility. A woman sits bent forward and coughing into her fists in triage. I wonder if it’s the dust.

“I don’t understand why they sent him here,” I say to my grandmother once we’re seated in the waiting area, for an hour, watching Dr. Phil cut out on a television in the corner.

“Well,” she says, “they told him to go to St. John’s.’”

“But that was before the tornado destroyed it.”

She shrugs. “We didn’t know where else to go, I guess.”

* * *

Danny Craven is the station manager and director of the JET 14 program at Joplin High School. I know one thing about JET 14 as we sit down in Danny’s makeshift studio for the summer, an empty classroom with a laptop open on a desk. I know Will Norton was in this class, the boy who died in the tornado driving home from his high school graduation, the boy who was going to attend film school this fall. As I crack my black-bound notebook open again, I tell myself I’m not going to say what I’m about to say.

“I had the idea for the anthology before the tornado,” I begin. I tell Danny it’s called Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema. “And it didn’t occur to me to make it a fundraiser until I saw the stories about Will Norton and his passion for filmmaking while he was a student here.”

I stop myself and look up at the ceiling, trying not to cry. I’m really not that good at this. When I lower my gaze again I see the same strained expression on Danny’s face.

After a pause he tells me, “He was pretty special, pretty inspiring.”

I focus on writing that down, pen scratching at the paper.

“He came to us from a private school specifically for the T.V. program,” he says.

The program, he explains, is a series of elective courses in which students run the school’s television station aired locally. In the courses, they learn about camera techniques, lighting and sound, broadcasting, storyboarding and scripting, video production. Students in the class are encouraged to gravitate toward the aspects of film or television production that interest them the most.

“How much of the equipment were you able to salvage?” I ask.

He glances around the room when he says, “This is it.”

As it was, they didn’t have enough for the 160 students in the program. Now they have next to nothing.

When I walk out of the school arm in arm with my grandmother, I know at least one thing for sure. We’ll be allocating the anthology proceeds for JET 14. Then my grandmother helps me navigate through the nameless streets and numberless addresses between the broken trees to find the high school. I sit behind the driver’s seat, holding the camera to my chest.

“I don’t know, grandma,” I say. “I feel bad.”

“It’s okay,” she says.

 

* Many thanks to Thelma Adams, Robin Antalek, Sean Beaudoin, Ernessa T. Carter, Richard Cox, Elizabeth Eslami, Nathan Larson, Vernon Lott, Greg Olear, Neal Pollack, David Small, Teddy Wayne and others TBA soon.

When I was in elementary school, my motto was “Another day, another A.” I didn’t go around chanting it in the hallways or anything like that; I wasn’t quite that smug (at least not publicly). This mantra of mine was more like a private joke, something my mother and I could laugh about when I got home each afternoon. After all, school was so easy. Why shouldn’t I boast about it? It made us both giddy. And as I piled up A’s, I also piled up awards: scholarship awards, citizenship awards, perfect attendance awards. I looked forward to the end-of-year assemblies, daydreaming about the accolades I might receive this year. By the time I reached fourth grade, Mrs. Corbet’s class, my obsessive grade-mongering was beginning to take on maniacal proportions.

One day, toward the beginning of the school year—there were tons of beautiful orange leaves on the ground outside, which were almost driving me to distraction—Mrs. Corbet announced that we were going to have a “pop quiz.” It was the first time I’d ever heard that term. I listened with alarm as she explained that it meant she was about to administer a test that we’d had no opportunity to prepare for whatsoever. My hand shot up immediately.

“But Mrs. Corbet, that’s not fair!” More than just fear that if I hadn’t had a chance to prepare, I might not know the answers, although that was certainly part of it, this idea of  a “pop quiz” upset some fundamental idea I had about the way the universe is supposed to work.

“Life is not fair,” Mrs. Corbet said, her tiny puckered mouth curling into a small smile as she handed me the quiz.

It was a single sheet of flimsy paper, printed with familiar, fragrant purple ink. Ten questions, with an extra-credit problem at the bottom. Fortunately, it seemed my alarm had been premature. As usual, these questions were easy. I worked through them quickly, knowing my answer was correct each time … until I reached the extra-credit problem. I felt a twinge of panic. I wasn’t sure about this one. True, it was only the extra-credit question, but I wanted to get them all right. The longer I stared at the page, the more uncertain I became. Mrs. Corbet announced time was up, and as she came down the aisle to collect the quizzes, I wrote down my best guess. But I was already consumed with doubt.

“Mrs. Corbet, when will we get these back?” I demanded as I handed her mine.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “I’ll have them graded on Monday.”

The weekend was agonizing. I could think of nothing but the quiz. What if I got the question wrong? On one hand, this seemed preposterous. I always got the answers right. But on the other hand, this particular question felt … off.

When Monday finally did roll around, I spent the whole day on the edge of my seat, waiting for Mrs. Corbet to hand the quizzes back. At three o’clock, when she started scribbling the day’s homework on the board, it was clear that this was not going to happen. My hand flew into the air.

“Mrs. Corbet, when are you going to hand back those quizzes we took last week? You said you were going to do that today.”

Everyone around me looked at me like I was insane.

“Yes, I did say that.” She deposited the chalk back in its tray and brushed her hands off on her skirt. “However, I didn’t have time to grade them this weekend. So I’m afraid you will just have to wait.”

Alone in my room that afternoon, I railed against Mrs. Corbet in my mind. The idea that she “didn’t have time” to grade our quizzes was appalling. As a teacher, wasn’t that her primary function? And if I hadn’t said anything, she wasn’t even going to mention it! Clearly her word meant nothing. Plus, her whole attitude was obnoxious. You will just have to wait. The gall! If a person says they are going to do something, they ought to do it—especially a teacher.

It wasn’t until a full week and a half later that Mrs. Corbet actually handed the quizzes back. Marked and circled in red ink at the top of mine was “100%”. My heart sank. Frantically, I scanned the bottom of the page. I knew it: I had gotten the extra-credit question wrong. But something still didn’t make sense.

“I’m pleased to say that some of you did very well on the quiz,” Mrs. Corbet said, addressing the class, “however, none of you got the extra-credit question right.” She smiled at us mischievously: “The truth is, it was a trick question. There is no right answer. So, the ‘right answer’ would have simply been that there isn’t one.”

I almost leaped out of my chair. A “pop quiz” and a “trick question”—how much abuse was I going to endure at the hands of this mousy little woman?

I waved my hand in the air frantically. Why did everyone else appear so unfazed? Mrs. Corbet didn’t want to acknowledge me, but she had to.

“Mrs. Corbet—a trick question?” My voice sounded even higher than normal. “I really don’t think that’s fair at all.”

Silence engulfed the room. Her hands on her hips, Mrs. Corbet appeared to be choosing her words carefully, relishing what she was about to say.

“Robert, someday you are going to have to learn that the world does not revolve around you.”

We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.

No one hates higher education more than I do.

Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh combined have fewer nasty things to say about the academic establishment, academic elitism, and academics.

Well, okay.  Maybe that’s a stretch.

But I’ve existed in academia, as either/both a student and an administrative employee, for a total of about 10 years.  If I go to graduate school and teach while I’m there, I’ll have been a student, a student worker, a high-access cog in the liberal arts funds development machine, and an instructor.  I’ll have done nearly everything important there is to do at a major University:  Learned, taught, suffered financial hardship, and gone begging for outrageous sums of money.  All I’ll have to do is write a couple of books, and I’ll be dean of something.

And I hate this place.

Potentially, no one is more preened, primed, and perfect for a doctorate and a long, tenured career in academia–likely with administrative outcomes–than I am.

Potentially no one loves that idea more than I do.

Academics, as far as I’m concerned, are functionally retarded.  And invaluable.

My sentiment is not unique.  All but uniformly, academics despise their institutions, each other, and less admittedly, probably, themselves.

Whether from guilt & self-loathing or from the ironic reality that often only academic people are experientially well-equipped, articulate, and interested enough to talk about everything that’s wrong with the academy, a HUGE portion of credible criticism of academia comes from people who are either near-academic in their devotion to intellectualism or who are academics proper, by occupation.

That is, even criticisms of academic and intellectual elitism somehow manage to conform to academia’s and intellectualism’s stereotypically insular and elitist reputations.  Generally, academia rejects any criticisms of itself that come from outside of academia, and certainly all that come from outside of the intelligentsia.    They are rejected for being ignorant, ill-informed, naive, or hostile.  In other words, Philistine.

That is, of course, unless academics are slumming, a pastime they’re prone to when new ideas (or more appropriately new twists on old ideas) are in short supply.  This is when the academic elite descend from the tower to mine the Volk and their various plights for inspiration, gather it into notebooks, movements, and activist tomes, then haul it all back to the tower where they huddle over it, clucking and opining and publishing-to-stave-off-perishing, for the next 10-20 years.

Inevitably, though, only experts, the expert conclusion ends up being, are qualified to point out how very much is wrong with experts being the only ones allowed to point things out.

Because they are academics, they cannot help be aware of this unfortunate feedback loop, an awareness that is able to do nothing more than shove the cognitive train along on its circular track.

What can one even do with a group of people like that?  Besides ignore them completely?

In my case, the answer appears to be, increasingly, “join them.”

It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that my usefulness to the world has very little to do with application.  Though I’m practical, I almost never have a practical solution to anything more complicated than mundane daily organization and logistics.  Or if I do have one, it is simply one among many, none of which I’m willing to marry.

But I have worked the 9-5 job.  I have worked in government & politics.  I have knocked doors and sold vacuums and attended staff meetings and generally made a good try of Doing, in both the private and public sectors.

Doing is not for me.

I don’t want to make decisions for people.  I don’t want to get paid to spend my life facing and trying to convince others they must face ultimatums and false dichotomies.  “Buy this or that.”  “You’re either with us or against us.”  “Deal or no deal?”  I don’t want to touch or be touched or put my “hands-on” anything.

If I’m being honest, what I want is to think for people.

I’d settle for just being able to think.

Much lip service is paid to academia’s role in teaching people how to think as opposed to what to think, but this is only half the story.  What one thinks is largely determined by how they go about it, and besides that, most college kids will forget how to think by their 2nd or 3rd year post-grad, provided real, non-scholarly life takes hold as one would expect.

But academic scholarship–especially, oddly enough, theoretical scholarship–has a way of worming its way into the public discourse, consciousness, and overall zeitgeist.  It is sneaky.  It happens via unassuming pop-science and human interest stories, self-help books, pedagogy, literary fads, and other realms in which the interests of the intelligentsia and the hoi polloi tend to cross paths, even if only superficially.

That is, after all, what academia’s mission is alleged to be:  Not to declare truth, but to affect the world through production of knowledge in a pursuit of truth that has no terminus.

The answer to “what should we Do” is always changing; picking one seems like a goose chase, and when people are fearful to admit the answer is always changing, that there may be a goose chase on, they tend to make hard and fast examples of themselves–make bold displays of ideological entrenchment and in doing so, contribute (though Doingly!) to en mass creative & intellectual wasting.

So it’s not that I don’t care.  I don’t like injustice or the demise of species or teen pregnancy or AIDS.  They should go away. I am definitely in the “anti-bad shit-and-pro-good shit” camp.

But if you were to ask me what, precisely, it means to be in that camp or what kind of daily activities such a camp should be engaged in, I’d be reluctant to give a straight–or even consistent–answer.  Because theory–the primary operating realm for many academics and committed intellectuals–is (or should be, theoretically) stubbornly resistant to final conclusions, ultimatums, and self-certainty. When it finds itself at a crossroads, it is liable to stand there, possibly indefinitely, contemplating and describing the crossroads from a glut of perspectives and declaring all the potential outcomes (or the impossibility of foreseeing all potential outcomes) of taking one road or another rather than actually taking one.

(And thus the native hue of resolution/Is sicklied o’er with pale cast of thought,/And enterprises of great pith and moment/with this regard their currents turn awry,/And lose the name of action.)

Some people find this behavior decadent and unhelpful, even sinister.  The generation and dissemination of knowledge, including obligatory guidance (or lack thereof) about what to do with said knowledge, has important, high-stakes moral and political implications.

Marxism, especially, is notoriously hostile towards academics for this very reason.  Academics, in their do-nothingness, are viewed as the unwitting and pathetic beige henchmen of the bourgeoisie.  The general characterization is that they lack the resolve, courage, and gumption to either be the bad guys or to stand up to the bad guys in a substantive way.  Their evil, it is figured, lies in their complicity and/or their complacency, neither of which is even a respectable, hands-on kind of evil.

This, indeed, has been the driving sentiment behind any number of academic persecutions (certainly not just among communists).

Like the extreme forms of government that act upon them, feelings of actionable resentment towards intellectuals and academics stem from ideological crises or desperation.  In times of frightening ideological and/or perceived moral or ethical ambiguity, in times of upheaval, shift, change, or general uncertainty about the future, people want to know what’s to be done, what will help, and where sure footing lies.  No one wants to hear that ambiguity or uncertainty or calamity is simply the nature of things–a nature for which there is no one cure, no guaranteed relief, no final, tidy answer.  No one wants to respect a perspective that prefers to incessantly describe the problem.

If we’re to be generous and stop short of accusing the human race of cowardice, we can at least say this habit frustrates the hell out of people in the same way anyone would be frustrated, no matter the circumstances, if he/she said, “There must be something we can do!!!”  and the answer returned was simply, “Maybe.  Maybe not.”

But certainty almost always (eventually) leads to hubris–or worse, zealotry–and someone, some contingent, must be willing to speak up for the humbling, humanizing powers of moral ambiguity, ethical relativism, waffling, question marks, and self-doubt.

In recent decades, the cost of college attendance has risen astronomically, and it has done so inversely to the off-campus value of the education said attendance (maybe?) provides.

In recent years, the reasons for going to college were reduced to one cynical, however honest, reason:  A B.A. won’t induce enlightenment, but if you can get a job, it will probably be better than the one you’d have had without the B.A.

Now even that–if employer sentiment is any indication–is sliding off the table.

Consider, please, as a relevant aside and if you have the time, this totally fascinating and utterly disturbing article from Malcolm Harris over at n+1: “Bad Education“.

It being the case that both liberals and conservatives–in their own idioms, as they are wont to do–seem increasingly dismissive of academic thinking (though neither is above seizing upon the “experts” it creates, as it suits political purposes), and even the final, very last, practical reason for attending college is losing favor among the people and the pundits (and of course, academics), the most radical, contrarian, and patriotic thing I can think to do is to join one of the oldest and most traditional institutional pillars of the democratic (or any enlightened) establishment.

Sometimes it’s just hip to be square.

Wherever people are running out, that’s where I want to run in.  Unless it’s an actual burning building and not a metaphorical one.  I’m a contrarian, not a hero.

People will tell me to suit myself (but imply it’s a stupid, masturbatory pursuit, “no offense”).

They will tell me to suit myself in the same way they tell me to suit myself when I declare that I won’t buy a Kindle.

“Suit your(tedious, sanctimonious)self.”

Finally, after hearing for the hundredth time that I am a know-it-all and a non-committal, snobby person who is totally oblivious to her surroundings & reality, including the plights of other human people, I heard it for what it was.  I heard what the fates had been trying to grind into my absent mind for so many years.  It was a calling. A dare to take (in)action.

“Fine,” I said to myself, I said, “If I am holy, then let the Ivory Tower be my convent.  If acting superior is what I do, then let me do it. For money.”

In the wise words of some chick I saw on a YouTube video:

The greatest service anyone can do for the world is to do whatever they do best.