God Let's Us Down

Coming to terms with God letting us down.

I hear it often: “People will let you down. Governments will let you down. The economy will let you down, but God will never let you down.”  Of course, this person either has very little experience with God, doesn’t know what “let down” means, is lying, or (most likely) has heard the cliché so many times that he or she just feels like the must repeat it. I think that there are three reasons God lets us down, but they can be summed up in a single sentence: “He’s God and you’re not.”

The Book of Job Letdown

When I hear someone say “God will never let you down,” my thought is, tell it to Job. Job was faithful. Job was doing what he was called to do and was being blessed as he did it. Then he hit hard times. Suddenly, his kids die, his wealth dries up, he gets sick and his wife tries to get him to commit suicide. Then his friends come over and basically tell him that God doesn’t let people down, and so Job needs to work on his relationship with God. Job finally gets fed up with it and says that God was wrong to let him down. Finally God shows up and tells Job’s friends that they are wrong. Then God tells Job that Job is wrong; God can do whatever he wants. Then God blesses Job a lot. He gets new children (as if children could be replaced), builds his wealth back up and lives to be an old man with a lot of stuff. There, I just summed up a book of the Bible for you in a single paragraph.

Of course there were all kinds of things going on in the spiritual realm of which Job was unaware. God had put a hedge of protection around Job (Job 1:10) that prevented the normal calamities of life from assaulting him. When God took it away, it seemed like everything hit at once . . . because it did. It seemed like God had stopped protecting Job . . . because God had. It seemed that God had let Job down . . . because God had let Job down.

Yes, God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy and have grace on whom he will have grace and it is not our place to say that anything at all is “not fair.” Still, Job was COUNTING on God. Job knew that it was only by God’s blessing that he had gained and maintained what he had. Job was counting on that blessing to continue. Job had plans and dreams and goals all of which involved God continuing to do what he had begun in Job’s life. When God stopped protecting him, Job was let down.

A reader might point out that God eventually restored Job. That’s true. Job knew the whole time that he was going through this that he was going to be restored. He kind of thought it was going to be after he died (Job 19:26) but he was sure God would vindicate him. Knowing that God will eventually take care of us, possibly after death, does not keep us from being let down from time to time.

God let’s us down because we have bad motives

Job’s case is the most extreme one I can think of. Still, we are let down by God often to much lesser degrees. I remember being “let down” by God very young. It was a different time than it is today, and quite a few kids brought to school these plastic toy guns which fired rubber, suction cup darts (today students would be expelled for pretending a stick is a gun). I wanted one of those. I was aware enough of our financial situation to realize that approaching Mom and Dad for such an item would be unrewarded. Santa Clause was unlikely to respond to my requests because it was spring semester. So, I prayed. I prayed every day that when I came home from school, there would be a dart gun for me. I knew such miracles happened because I’d heard testimony in church and even seen it happen for my parents: there was a particular need, they prayed, the need was met.  I needed a dart gun, so I prayed for one. I prayed earnestly and fervently until the dart guns went out of style and all the kids were playing something else.  I only remember this because, even though they were now “out of style” so to speak, I still wanted one and asked for one for my next birthday and received it.

Praise the Lord! Your prayers were answered!
Six months too late.

I’m fairly certain that God letting me down, in this case, falls into the James 4:3 clause as to why I didn’t get what I wanted: “And even when you ask, you don't get it because your motives are all wrong--you want only what will give you pleasure.” I wanted a dart gun because everyone else had one and they were all enjoying shooting each other all over the playground. This is not to say that God doesn’t want us to have pleasure. He does. Sometimes he even gives us what we ask for despite the fact that we are asking from the wrong motives because he wants us to have pleasure. He is in no way bound to do it, however.

 When we don’t get what we are asking for because we are asking from the wrong motives, we feel like God has let us down. My motive for wanting a dart gun was so that I could “fit in.” What I didn’t realize at the time, however, is that God made me a unique person who was never supposed to “fit in.” I came to realize this several years later. I wanted another thing that many of my peers had (acid washed Jordache jeans?) and approached my Dad about it. When he asked why I felt like I needed them, rather than sturdy wranglers for one tenth the price, I explained that I wanted to be like other people. I remember quite clearly my Dad saying “You shouldn’t be like other people. You should be better than other people and when you can’t be better, you should at least be different because God hates a conformist.”

 My Dad was right. God was right. I don’t know about all conformists although I’m fairly certain I know some of the scriptures that were in Dad’s head when he said that (Ezekiel 11: 12, Matt. 5:48, Romans12:2, 2 Cor. 6:17, I Peter 2:9). I do know, now, however, that God did not call me to be like other people. I have a God-given personality that, even when abstracted by MBTI type, still only accounts for less than 5% of the population. I have been called to college teaching which requires a terminal degree, which fewer than 3% of the population of the US acquire. As far as people who work in my particular field (Communication Studies) the National Communication Association estimates that there are just over 8,000 of us in the whole flipping world. That is .0001% of the world’s population.  Oh, and I have a niche specialty within that discipline. God had a very specific and, yes, weird, plan for my life. And when I think that I asked God and my earthly Father to help me be normal, I realize that I would have been MISERABLE. Still, at that time, when I asked, and the answer was “no” I was very let down.

God has something else

Sometimes our motives are right and God is not removing his protection for his own divine reasons. Sometimes God just has something better for us. One of my favorite line from the film The Social Network is when Sean Parker’s character, played by Justin Timberlake tells Mark Zuckerberg’s character, played by Jesse Eisenberg, “A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars!” I think that God lets us down because what we want just isn’t awesome enough. Ephesians 3:20 talks about this God being able to do “exceedingly and abundantly beyond all that we ask or think!”

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I keep a list of things that I want. Part of the reason I started this is that my wife’s love language is gift giving, and if she’s going to spend my money on something for me, I thought, I’d prefer it be something I want. I kind of see that as a snotty attitude now, but I’ve kept the list going. It’s done a lot for me. First of all, when I see something new that I want I can check myself. Would I rather have that $20 video game now or that $200 projector for my classroom in a year? Here’s the thing that I didn’t expect when I made the list, however. Fully ¾ of the stuff on the list has come to me since I put it on there. The vast majority has come for free and not as a gift from my wife drawing on our joint checking account. Even when I did have to pay, it is always at a fraction of the price I list when I say I want something. It is like God saying “Letting you set aside $2000 to buy a used suv isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Getting you an SUV for $250” or “giving you a chance to buy that book isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Finding the book you want in the free box at the library” or "getting that paperback isn't cool. You know what's cool, getting the entire series in library editions for free." This stuff happens all the time.

Still, while we are waiting for what we want, and don’t get it, we feel let down. We want it and we want it now and if we don’t we’re let down.

Nostalgia

Coming to terms with the past

"And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good’” (Luke 5:39 ESV). 

It seems so often that we long for what we have lost. We remember the deceased dog that willingly obeyed our commands. We think back to when our bodies could take more than they can now. We remember times and places with friends and want that back. We throw open the hood of our car and remember how easy it was to change a sparkplug before they changed things. We think back on our idyllic childhoods, or better yet the childhoods of our parents, grandparents or great grandparents and wish we could live in those moments. We look back on the price of gas, the price of rent, the price of bread and remember it fondly. 

I am as prone to nostalgia as anyone I think. Whenever I have change in my pocket totally one dollar or more, I'd remember how I'd scrounge for change each month as a child. I'd get up to a dollar and then go down to the local drug store and buy a Fantastic Four comic and a candy-bar. Now, I could maybe get the candy-bar. For many years I looked back on "college" as some kind of utopia. I loved late nights with friends, chatting, drinking and smoking. Now, I do not smoke, rarely drink and certainly do not stay up late with friends. Post-collegiate friendships are much more limited and contextual. I simply do not "hang out" anymore. 

I am also prone to nostalgize experiences I've never had. I imagine myself as a professor 50 years ago. I imagine myself discussing ideas in the faculty club, when there were such things, wearing wool suits and smoking a pipe. I imagine a time when one could, quite legally, hitchhike across the country and wish I could experience that. I even go back further in my mind and imagine a world where men worse suits of armor and settled legal differences with a trial by combat. In such situations, in my mind, I win.

And that is the problem with nostalgia. We remember the wins, the pleasures, the friends, the laughter, the joy. We forget that life sucked then too. In many ways, it sucked worse. Good history, in my opinion, reminds us of this. It keeps us from becoming too nostalgic and dwelling in a past that was not as beautiful as we see it. 

Good history looks at documents and reminds us of facts. I was a quite prolific poetry writer during my college days. While I remember the time as one filled with parties and friends, I can return to my old writings and see how excruciatingly lonely I was. How is this in keeping with my memories of the parties? I write about going out and coming back, alone, to my empty room. I may rarely go to parties now, but when I do, I always come home with my wife. While I may miss those close friendships, the loneliness I feel now is always mitigated by her presence. While I rarely have friends who "drop by" as they did in my 20's, I have a person who is just about always there. I wrote in one poem that I had gone three days without speaking a word to anyone. I have no doubt that it was true. I wonder what my wife would think of it if I tried that!

I love to take my friends who are so concerned about "crime these days" to the Department of Justice's Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics site which tracks crime since 1961. There was this little uptick of crime in the late 1970's and a considerably smaller one in the late 1990's (during that idyllic time when I was in college). Other than that, violent crime rates have gone down markedly or in a couple cases stayed the same since the 1960's. Groups like the Justice Research and Statistics Association track violence for even longer, and it is clear the violence in America is no where near the level it was in the 1930's and looking at their graphs it is difficult to even imagine how "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" (to take Hobbes completely out of context) life was for people only that short time ago! 

Sometimes we get into this circle of nostalgia. We start dreaming of the good old days. One person makes a comment about how good things use to be. The next person believes it. Before long we actually start to believe that things use to be better. I recently read an article where a historian takes a polemicist, passing himself off as a philosopher, to task for talking about how the money plays such a greater role in the culture "these days." The article did not even cite Milton Friedman's Noble Prize winning proof that while the gap between rich and poor may be increasing, the gap between poor now and poor earlier is such that the poorest people today would be considered wealthy by the standards of 40 years ago. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting richer. They only see themselves as poor because they are comparing themselves to the rich. The starvation which was so prevalent in America has been replaced with an obesity epidemic among the very poor. Now, that's not a good thing and we should move toward a place where the poorest people can eat healthy diets. Still, we have to admit that obesity really is a step up from starvation. 

Now, don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with raising an Ebenezer from time to time. It is important to remember the good things that have happened in the past so that we can repeat them. There is also a problem with being so focused on dreams of the future that we miss the awesome stuff going on right now. The problem lies in the idealizing of the past. It lies in wasting the present because we want to remember a past that is better than it actually was. 

The Classical Rhetoric of Video Games

Coming to terms with video games.


I think it is time to get a new video game for my PS3. I've played through the story-line of all of them that I have. So, I need a new one. I'm very open to suggestions, but I don't want to get a game I won't like or that I won't have time to play.


I like games that have a strong aesthetic component. That needs to have two parts to it. I'll call them delivery and style, because I am a classical rhetorician. First of all, delivery, the game needs to be visually appealing. I played the 8-bit games as a kid, and was never too impressed with video games. Then one day when I came home from graduate school and my brothers were playing Final Fantasy X. It was beautiful.  Watching the main character traverse through beautiful forests and sparkling waterfalls amazed me. I went home and blew student loan money and a PS2 that I am still paying for to this day. It wasn't the game itself, it was the beauty, the images, that almost haunted me. The delivery doesn't have to focus on the beautiful. As we know from Longinus, the sublime can be quite terrifying. I liked the more gritty and bloody imagery of Dragon Age II or Arkham Asylum every bit as much as I liked the sparkling waterfalls of Final Fantasy. Remember, this is a VIDEO game, and I need to be amazed by images.


Style is also important. Whether the game is an epic, a tragedy, a comedy a didactic, a jeremiad (that would be something I've never played), an elegy, a satire or whatever, the game needs to tell a fitting story. This is why I do not like "sports" games or "fighting" games as a general rule: "2-3-4 what are we fighting for?" I need to be invested in a reason to do what they are doing. Fighting without reason lacks catharsis and just seems mean. We need a good story. The story should not get too complicated, however. While I loved the graphics of Dragon Age II, the plot line got way too complicated for the way I play. I do not have time to play video games every day. When I do, it might be for an hour or so, and only get a good three hours in one weekend a month. I need to remember what I am doing and why. That is part of the reason I prefer nonlinear gameplay of the classic Role playing games, like most of the Final Fantasy series. Sometimes I have time to complete a quest. Other times, I need to be able to help my character just by gaining some experience points.


I also  need to have what the classical rhetoricians called good "invention," logic, emotion and character. We need coherence. No, it does not have to be fully rational. Magic and superhuman abilities are an important part of why we play. However, if you can fly one minute, you should not be falling the next unless some reason was given as to why you lost that power. If you can knock down one wall, you should be able to knock down similar walls. I need to be emotionally tied to the characters. While an aura of mystery for one or two members of the party are great, I am not going to care that much in the violent world of video games if someone I don't know dies. Finally, the character is essential. There are a number of reasons why video games based on movies are often so bad. The writers assume the characters of the movies and do nothing through game play to flesh them out. Sorry, not interested.


I also need to feel the arc of the story-line, what the ancient rhetoricians called "arrangement." The best arrangement I've found for video games are those that follow the traditional: equilibrium→problem→disequilibrium→epiphany→climax→conclusion model of the contemporary novel. That is not the only choice, and it can be great for us to think we're going to get resolution a few times and be wrong. On the other hand, constantly finding that the princess is in another castle eventually gets tiresome. Give me a beginning which foreshadows the middle which foreshadows the end, please. 


Those of you who are rhetorical scholars know I still have to talk about the final canon, memory. I don't want to have to take notes during a video game. I do, however, want the pleasure of seeing things come together. I love it when things suddenly make sense based on what I remember from earlier in the game. That is awesome.

So, that's what I'm looking for in my next video game. Any suggestions? 

On Notice

Coming to terms with no terms of surrender

On Notice

Consider this a blast of the Shofar!

Hear this holy chant as my battle cry!

For the soldier comes ready for full war

Rouse the whole camp and be ready to die!

You may flee to the mountains, flee to the cave

Fortify those great strongholds you still own.

But nothing can hide you nothing can save

you from losing your seat, your stolen throne.

Usurper, Murderer, Master of Lies,

Killer of Innocent babes in the Womb,

Hope Stealer, Lie-Talker, Blinder of Eyes

You must prepare for your fiery tomb.

Too long I've hid beneath my faithful shield.

Too long I've prayed for the strength to endure.

Too long I've been willing too much to yield.

Too long I've tolerated the impure.

But I will not stand for what is not right.

I've come not to cower. I've come to fight.

June 28th, 2012

Not really a "break."

Coming to terms with my job.

Another semester has come to an end and I sit here in my office knowing that there is much to do, but still too tired to do it. The Spring 2012 semester has probably been one of the most successful semesters I've had. Research has moved forward. Teaching has gone well. My various committees have been more successful than I would have thought possible. All of this has been great, but I am tired and struggling to get on with the next stages of what I have to do. What makes it worse is all the voices I hear from students, friends and family saying "enjoy your break." The truth is that we don't really get a break the way that they're thinking. That is just one of many things that people don't really understand about what I do and that's okay. Still, I thought that I'd sit down for a minute and tell people what a Communication professor at a small state university does.

It is easy enough to explain what I do, because I have to do explain it three times every semester in my MBO (Management By Objectives) meeting with my boss. Then she has to explain what I do to her boss. I am not sure if her boss really has to talk to anyone about me or not. The end result is that it's all written down, documented, explained and defended.I can tell you EXACTLY what I do.

55% of what I did this year was teaching.

That number is not some made up number. I know it's 55% because that is what is registered witht the State of New Mexico. If everything goes right, I teach 12 three credit-hour classes per year. That's five classes in the fall, five in the spring and two in the summer. I am only contractually obligated to teach eight classes per year, but that doesn't really pay a livable wage. So, I teach an "overload" of one class each semester and two extra classes in the summer.

Classroom instruction isn't the whole of the "teaching" part. This 55% also includes training on various pedagogical tools available, creating new courses, designing syllabi, evaluating textbooks, writing exams, and answering phone calls. Teaching is my favorite part of the job and I am very blessed that such a large percentage of my job involves teaching. If I were at a larger school, it would be far less. For the rest of May, I will not be teaching, but that doesn't really mean, however, that I have a break. I still need to do all of the parts of teaching that are not classroom instruction, and there is also, still, the other 45% of the job which continues throughout the summer.

5% is advising. 

This is a small amount primarily because I do not have any majors. I do help a lot of students who are planning to transfer fill out the paperwork that they are supposed to be dealing with all along if they are planning on transferring. I do this because I get all the students passing through my class, and I find that most are not told that there is paperwork to fill out if they are taking their general studies here and plan to transfer later. If they'd fill out the paperwork, they'd probably have better luck getting stuff to move.

I do more advising during the summer. Admissions calls in anyone who will to help incoming freshmen with setting up their first semester. I like meeting the new folks, so I generally do this. Besides, it is 5% of my job.

20% of my job is research. 

Last academic year I presented a paper I wrote in New Orleans and another in Albuquerque. I submitted three competitive papers to academic journals. One was rejected. One needs to be revised and resubmitted. The third one is still in the process of peer review. I also got one chapter of an edited volume out and it is in its second stage of revision, but has been fully accepted.

Research is one of those things I find people who are not professors don't really understand. We travel to these conferences with very little reembursement and often none at all. My department allows $600 per year per person. You can see, flying to New Orleans, staying in a hotel for a week and having to eat out does not really get covered by $600. The other one, in Albuquerque, I was on my own. We also don't get paid for our journal articles, papers and chapters. Those are printed in academic journals that are generally only sold to university libraries at a cost that doesn't always cover printing and shipping costs.

Books, if single authored and not edited volumes, do make a little money. I've been working on a book and have done a great deal of research recently on how Academic publishing works. Academic books are not like books that are published by the popular press in their business model. Books published by Random House or Hachette generally publish large runs of a few books and pay fairly substantial royalties to their authors. Academic books generally publish one or two small runs of a few books which are only sold to research libraries in universities, government and sometimes graduate classes. A typical academic contract for a book is like this: The publisher agrees to run 500 copies of a book. The list price is $80 and the author makes 10% of actual reciepts after invoices. That would be $8 per book, so around $4,000. That wouldn't be a bad check, but for academic books, it won't happen. A third of the books will be given away to professors teaching seminars on related topics in hopes that they will adopt the book for the class. The reciepts on those will be zero. That takes it down to $2672, still, not a bad check. But in academic publishing the book has to be peer reviewed. Peer reviews I've done have paid about $200 and that money comes out of the author's royalties. So, if there are five reviewers, we're down to $1672. Unfortunately, if there is any artwork in the book, that also is paid for out of the author's royalties. What this means is that the first run of a book generally nets the author a royalty check somewhere in the three digits.

BUT remember those free books that were sent out to professors? If a few of them actually DO adopt your book for their classes and students have to buy it, there can be a second run and there are much better chances that the author will actually make a little money. I have a good friend who has published a book that is quite popular by academic standards. The book has gone through several editions and is used in a number of classes. I asked him outright how much he makes in royalties. He told me that he can pretty much count on making enough every month to pay his cell phone bill.

Edited volumes are much like this, but the royalties go to the editors, not the authors.Editors are contracted by royalties like authors are. The book chapter which will hopefully be coming out soon will not earn me a dime. Hopefully, Zack, my editor, does make some money though. He's earned it with all the work he's done collecting authors and packaging our work.

We don't get paid much if anything for our academic writing by publishers, but we are getting paid. Research is 20% of my job. So, taxes in the State of New Mexico and students' tuition dollars pay me to do research. If I ever get anything from a publisher, that's bonus.  Research is actually an enjoyable part of my job, and it continues all throught the summer.

10% of my job is Professional Contributions

Universities are not the same as high-schools. We do have management and administration, but a massive portion of our governance is managed by the people who teach the classes. I hate this part of my job, but think it should be larger. I served this semester on the service learning committee which created a definition of service learning which made it a requirement for all incoming freshmen beginning in Fall 2012. I served on the Academic Symposium committee which put on a pretty amazing show a couple weeks ago, if you want the truth. I took part in our assessment convocation, where I did some pedagogical training of my own. This summer I have to be on the judicial committee and listen to student appeals. I was also active in our General Assembly and department meetings.

Like I said, I hate this part of my job and think that there should be more to it. I hate it because meetings are a boring way to do thing. I hate it because it involves hours and hours of roberts rules of order and dull data crunching. I hate it because I'm not a very social person and I have to deal with people.

On the other hand, I think we should do more of it. Over the past 20 years, tuition costs for students have skyrocketed. All this time, however, professors' wages have been stagnant, even plummeted if inflation is figured in. Part of the reason for this is that states have steadily decreased the tax funding which goes to colleges. The other reason
is that professors actually don't do as much committee work as we used to. Teaching and reseach requirements have increased and we've turned over the management of our schools, increasingly, to professional administrators. These administrators could be administrating Fortune 500 companies, and can demand paychecks as though they were. They administrate the universities around the country like for profit businesses and demand much of that profit be returned to them. I think this is a bad direction. I really think that faculty such as myself should be spending LESS time teaching and more time administrating so that we could cut out a few of these high-priced positions, especially because education, not the bottom line, needs to be formost in the decision making.

10% of my job is "Personal Relationships."

I need to be actively engaged in creating a positive relationship between the community and the university. This academic year I taught a Financial Peace University class at my church and later created a "Communicating God's way" weekend seminar for the community through my church. I volunteered at the Blue's Festival, taught a "leadership" course for highschool students through one of the local non-profits, gave a speech for Kiwanas, and other stuff that I'll not go too much into here. When summer comes, I have to keep doing this stuff. I enjoy it. I love it. I have to do it.

So, that's it 100%.

I do feel better now. Hopefully, next time you see me, you can  say "how's your paper coming" or "I saw in the newspaper that you're doing such and such" or "Did you get outside yesterday, or were you in meetings?" You can say this stuff instead of  saying, "How's your break?"

Reaching up, Reaching out

Coming to terms with better than average high-school students.

Keynote:

I have the honor of being the keynote speaker this evening for the Kiwanis Club's banquet for graduating seniors who have been a part of the Key Club service organization (Kiwanis for high-school folks). I was probably asked for two reasons. The first is that it is no secret locally that I like to give speeches and will do so if asked. The second reason is that I am the faculty adviser for CKI (Kiwanis for college folks, formerly Circle K), and they would like me to use this as a recruiting tool to maintain members in the club. I think I accomplish that in the speech below while simultaneously honoring these extraordinary young people.

Reaching up and Reaching Out

I. Exordium:

You students who we rightly honor today have done a marvelous thing. I’m not talking about finishing high school. While that is a rite of passage and a moment worthy of celebration, it is not in and of itself amazing. More than 75% of all people your age in the United States will accomplish that this year. While cynics will decry that the other 25% should have graduated as well, I will point out to them that only 20 countries in the world have a higher rate and that they do so only by excluding from high-school the sick, the delinquent, the physically and mentally challenged and those who struggled in lower grades. Certainly nearly everyone in South Korea, for instance, who begins high-school finishes high-school, but very few are allowed entrance. No, in the United States we do not exclude people from opportunity. We give everyone the chance to try, knowing that some will fail.

It is no marvelous thing, then, that you succeeded where most do. What is marvelous is that in so doing, you also reached out to aid the struggling.  The marvelous thing is that others will also follow in your footsteps because you did not just press on toward your goal, but lifted others. Many people achieve marginal success in life, but it is the truly great who do so while helping to ease the path of others. That is what you have done, and THAT is why we celebrate you here tonight.

II. Narratio:

The average student works hard. The average student has to balance the demands of school, the activities of their families, the extracurricular activities of sports and clubs, the excruciating demands of a high-school social life and for most of you, a part time job. We know from careful demographic research that the average student today has more of his or her day scheduled than has been the case in the history of the United States. We cannot hold liable those thousands of 18 year olds graduating this year who have done nothing to aid their community, nothing to help the helpless, nothing to repair what has been destroyed. They have, undoubtedly been too busy.

The thing is, that the students we honor tonight have been just as busy. Into that busy-ness they have also  placed into their lives another commitment, a commitment to service. They have not only reached out to pull themselves from where they were but they have reached out. These are a special group we honor today. They are truly among the best in our nation.

III. Partito:

If I can, I would like to exhort these students on to further good works. I would like to talk to them about the opportunities that are available. Finally, I would like to warn them that, as there has been in the past, so there shall be in the future, barriers to service.

IV. Confirmatio:

A. As you go forth from your high-school, you immediately have more choice in your life than you’ve ever had before. For some of you, further education at a University or college awaits. For others, you may go directly into careers. For others, a time of military service, or even a military career may be your plan. These are all honorable endeavors if they are approached honorably. And the first piece of advice I give you is that you truly do make this decision honorably and with careful thought.  As a college professor I’ve seen too many brilliant and talented young people destroying their lives because college is not what they want to do, but they feel forced by certain social norms of their parents’ peer groups. No, while most students graduate, fewer than 25% go onto college and those that don’t often have satisfactory lives anyway.

B. But once you have made that decision, seek out places where you can continue your life of service. If your choice is to go directly into the work force, don’t let the new job stop you from becoming something more. Maintain your activity in the community. Joining groups such as Kiwanis right away will help you from sliding off into the “too busy” world and becoming, merely, average. Religious organizations and other community groups can help as well. For many who join the military, their life of daily service seems enough, and in truth, it is. Our military men and women are the most self-sacrificing people in the world, and anyone who does not honor them for this service alone is an ungrateful fool. But still, even your spare moments, make sure that you continue to stay connected to the community you serve and come to know the women and men you are protecting. Finally, for those of you heading into college, you too must continue to serve.  There are many community and religious organizations on every campus which do amazing things for their community. I am one of the faculty advisors for CKI, and I would love to see you join our organization if you come to WNMU. And even beyond that, continue to serve. WNMU has just begun offering Service Learning courses, courses which incorporate what you’ve been learning in the classroom into community service projects. Many other universities have been doing so for more than a decade. The average college student avoids these like the plague. They require more time, more dedication, and most dreaded, working with other people. I challenge you NOT to avoid service learning classes. I challenge you to be the college students who seek them out, who think stuff learned in the classroom is great, but making it work in real life is better.

C. (Refutatio) Finally, I want to warn you about the dangers of your new stage. In truth, these are not new dangers, you’ve heard about them your entire life. There is a monster which stalks our service at every turn. That is the monster of BUSY-NESS. As busy as you are in high-school, you will be more busy afterwards. When I talk to students who tell me that they are not busy, I usually find it is because they are not doing their homework, especially their daily reading. Studies, families, careers, television, Facebook and everything else in our lives calls our unceasing attention away from service. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things. In fact, if a person let their kids starve so they could feed the homeless, there’d be something wrong. Still, for many being busy becomes an excuse, then a way of life, then a form of slavery.

V. Peroratio:

But I hope for more than that from you. You have already distinguished yourselves from the average rif-raf graduating all over the country this year. You have already shown through your activities in Key Club that you are truly cut from better cloth than most people. You have shown that you step up to the plate to make the world a better place. That is why we honor you today. We honor you because you have shown yourself honorable. We don’t mere celebrate you getting through high-school, but we thank you for all your service.

Edited 5/4/12 because of a particularly embarrassing spelling mistake. I apologize for that one!

The Future

Coming to terms with the future:

The Future of the Past

I don’t remember my 2^nd grade teacher, Mr. Conklin, all that well. I remember he had a giant “pencil” made out of a fencepost at the front of the class. I remember that he had a monkey puppet named “Monte Math” that I assume that he used to teach us math, although I don’t remember that actually happening. I remember him saying that by the year 2000, we’d be living on the moon. The future was this amazing place full of adventure and excitement, new discoveries, robot maids, world peace and maybe even aliens. I day-dreamed about the future all the time.

In some ways, I think some of us have felt like “the future” has let us down. This sadness became salient as we watched the Space Shuttle Discovery being flown on the back of a jet to its “final resting place” in a museum.

[Picture Courtesy of NASA]

Not only are we not living on the moon, we aren’t even going to send up shuttles anymore. While some say that we are giving up the shuttle program because we are going to “the next era” of extraterrestrial travel, there are so many questions. Will we really? How long will it take? Who will pay for it? Without the impetus to conquer space before the communists, what will its driving purpose be? There are too many questions about the future, too many doubts, too many fears. When a Presidential candidate talks about his goals of a moon-base, he is mocked in the media.

The hopelessness of the future pervades our mass media. While television science fiction once primarily showed the Earth as a future utopia, where we would have to seek out adventure among the stars, current popular culture shows a future dystopia, dirty, polluted, controlled by vice and corruption, where getting through daily life is a violent and dangerous adventure in and of itself. My students don’t hope for a good position on a moon-base. They are preparing (only half-jokingly) for a zombie apocalypse.

Expect the best, prepare for the worst.

One of my favorite student speeches this semester was from a young woman for whom the above mentioned zombie apocalypse was the subject of her deliberative speech. Her argument was reminiscent of Blaise Pascal’s theological wager that if Christianity is false, he’s at least lived a better life for believing it was true. This woman’s argument was that if one prepares for a zombie apocalypse, and there is no zombie apocalypse, one has still made one’s home secure, has extra food and water on hand and has learned some survival skills. None of these will ever prove to be a disadvantage and might prove advantageous in any number of situations other than a zombie apocalypse. The speech was fun, well researched, creative and well delivered. It also was a pretty solid argument. The old saw that we should expect the best and prepare for the worst is good advice for preparing ourselves for the future.

There are people with whom I’ve attended church who have told me “I don’t contribute to a retirement fund because the Lord’s coming back before I’ll be old enough to retire.” Well, if they’re right that’ll be great. What if they’re wrong? Every generation of Christians has believed that they lived in the end times. One of them will eventually be right.

President Obama is suffering some bad press right now because of his deep seeded belief that solar energy is the energy of the future. He’s sunk billions of tax payer dollars into solar energy companies which, even with that money, have come crashing down, unable to create a viable product. Now, Obama may turn out to be right yet. I don’t know what the “energy of the future” is. Still, it might be wise to look at more options. Perhaps he should have been prepared for the idea that this whole thing might not work out.

It is good to be optimistic, as I’ll discuss later, but maybe you should prepare for retirement in case Jesus doesn’t come back right away. Maybe you should invest in things that are already proven. Maybe you should have some extra canned food in your pantry. Maybe you should have a fire extinguisher, a smoke detector and some insurance even though you probably won’t have a house fire. Maybe you should quit smoking because perhaps they won’t have it all cured by the time it catches up to you. Bad things happen. They really do. Bad things will continue to happen in the future and a utopian society will not exist so long as it is made up of fallen people.

But good things happen too, and while I am sometimes disappointed to not be on the moon, I am amazed by what does exist. The modern mobile phone, really a mobile computing device, is a great example. Teachers once told me that I might live on the moon, but they also told me that I wouldn’t always have a calculator with me. Bull. For $49 a month, after taxes, not only do I have my communication hub always with me, I have a calculator, a calendar, a dictionary, a phone-book, an encyclopedia, a notebook, a stopwatch, a camera and even a music player which is always with me. I don’t have a robot maid, but by constantly jingling me with little reminders throughout the day, my phone is really is often a robot secretary. All this, and my phone is not even a very good one! It’s one of the cheapest, no contract phones from Wal-mart.

We often hear about how college students today spend fewer hours studying than they did ten years ago, but teachers are requiring hundreds more pages of output from students than they once did. A ten page term paper was once the standard maximum output from a college sophomore, and that would only be in the few classes which actually required any writing. Writing across the curriculum initiatives at colleges all over the country have made the term paper a standard in almost every class and 10 pages would be a short one, probably only existing in classes where the professor already required two five page papers earlier in the semester. The reason that we are able to require more output and they do less work is the same reason that you are required to create more output in less time at your job than you once did. It is because so much of what was once time consuming is now automated. Students don’t even need to set foot in a library to do real, solid, research anymore.

I could go on and on. The e-reader which will look up words you don’t know as you read and pronounce the ones you don’t know how to pronounce is amazing. The little GPS that my wife and I take on trips has been awesome. Streaming Netflix has changed our lives. Many of my students, even those who live right on campus, still take my classes online because asynchronous learning is a better pedagogy for them.  And just think about this blog; anybody can have one.

Wow! Maybe the future isn’t bad after all. Still, maybe we should get ready just in case it is.

The Future of the Future.

I think we have a real social need for futurists right now. I think we need to have people who can narrate a vision for the future that gives us a reason to dream. I think that dreams beget goals which beget objectives which beget tangible betterment for all of us. We need to be thinking about moon-bases and clean energy. We need to be imagining scientific breakthroughs and philosophical developments. We need these because while we need to plan for the worst, we also need to hope for the best.

In the past there were futures predicted that were wrong. We don’t have regular extraterrestrial vacations for the average consumer. There were also predictions that are right. The other day I was having lunch with one of our administrators and talking about this need. The administrator asked me what I think was supposed to be a rhetorical question: “Who could have imagined the internet or the smart-phone 30 years ago?” I answered: “Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong.” Then I had the wonderful opportunity to teach my colleague about the amazing work of some great communication researchers. These men’s work looked at the way that the world was changing and saw the potential for that change. After seeing the potential, they articulated that potential. It was really from the articulation of the potential that others were able to make it happen.

I think we need to continue that kind of work right now. Researchers need to be willing to speculate realistically and positively about the potential for change which is good. I am working on several papers right now, and among the work I am doing is some that I hope moves in this direction. I see great potential in what we are now seeing in the kindle and nook that I know is going to change the way we communicate.

I also think we need good science fiction again. Science fiction has always held in it the warning of the dangers of technological advancement, but it also needs to hold the hope of overcoming those dangers. Science fiction should not just tell us that the zombies are coming because the virus escaped from the lab. It should also show us how we can use that same ingenuity and technology to defeat the zombies. It shouldn’t just plan for the worst, it should also hope for the best.