Decisions of conscience

I just got this email today from a major in the military. I am gratified that I helped someone think for themselves and make a conscientious decision…but I suspect it was more his experiences and his own considerations that led him to this point.

Prof. Myers,

A while back you wrote a blog post that may have catalyzed a major life decision for me. My life will be definitely be changing because of it, whether for the better or not remains to be seen but I wanted to thank you. You wrote a post dealing with realities of war, specifically on killing. I won’t bore you with the details about how exactly it affected me but rather just to that it very strongly moved me and upset me deeply. I have decided to stop killing because of it. I indirectly caused deaths in a military mission maybe 8 years ago (though I’m not sure , I relive the scene so vividly and often that it might as well been last week). As I did it I didn’t really think of much other that making sure I executed the task well and I remember being nervous in that respect and then just elated that the other guys didn’t succeed at their task of killing me. Months afterwards it started to sink in and I felt sick. About 4 years ago I killed again but it was not so indirect. I had pulled the trigger myself, ending 2 lives directly and helped with a few more that day as well. I was in zero danger of harm myself and maybe that’s why it affected me different. Nausea hit quickly (minutes), then depression/anxiety/nightmares. The weight of it just kept coming down and down more and more until I had to begin to rationalize to keep it from overwhelming me. I did a pretty good job of it until your post snapped the flimsy shell and ruined what I had carefully constructed over the years. I realized that I can choose my own fate and not have to choose between following orders/accomplishing the mission and being true to my ethics. I’ve decided to separate from the military after 12+ years service and come the end of June I will be a civilian. I’ve carefully thought the decision through and weighed the pros and cons. Believe me, giving up that military retirement was not terribly easy (it’s so much money) but, I keep thinking of the idea that I may be called upon to kill again in the next 8 years and no amount of money is worth it. Thank you for helping me break through my self delusion. I enjoy your blog and I think you should know that while you may not get through to everyone, you are doing good (IMHO) during your short stay on planet earth.

It sounds to me like he was being human, and aware of it.

My correspondent did not say, but it might have been my Shades of Gray post.

I hate Thursdays

Mondays aren’t bad—I’ve had the weekend to get ready and get some of the backlog cleared away, so I can go into class prepared and confident. Wednesday’s pretty good, too, since that’s actually the day with my lightest teaching load. Tuesdays and Thursdays, though, my morning is effectively blocked out with nothing but teaching, and then there are the committee meetings, and to cap it all off, there’s a seminar class from 5 to 6pm…and worse, by Thursday all the momentum I had acquired over the weekend is exhausted, and I’m scrambling to do the prep work for my Friday classes.

Friday is Friday, and you’ve got to love Friday. But Thursday…oh, man, it’s the armpit of the week.

And today is Thursday.

Never mind me. I just had to get that gripe off my chest.

Perhaps they should also remove the word “education”

Because someone doesn’t understand the word. The New York City Department of Education wants to ban the use of certain words on standardized tests — because they might make students feel uncomfortable or unpleasant. Jebus. If an educator isn’t making a student uncomfortable, isn’t pushing his or her students to be stressed by new concepts and difficult processes, they aren’t doing their job.

What words, you might ask, are they sheltering impressionable youth from?

Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological)
Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs
Birthday celebrations (and birthdays)
Bodily functions
Cancer (and other diseases)
Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
Celebrities
Children dealing with serious issues
Cigarettes (and other smoking paraphernalia)
Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or library setting)
Crime
Death and disease
Divorce
Evolution
Expensive gifts, vacations, and prizes
Gambling involving money
Halloween
Homelessness
Homes with swimming pools
Hunting
Junk food
In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge
Loss of employment
Nuclear weapons
Occult topics (i.e. fortune-telling)
Parapsychology
Politics
Pornography
Poverty
Rap Music
Religion
Religious holidays and festivals (including but not limited to Christmas, Yom Kippur, and Ramadan)
Rock-and-Roll music
Running away
Sex
Slavery
Terrorism
Television and video games (excessive use)
Traumatic material (including material that may be particularly upsetting such as animal shelters)
Vermin (rats and roaches)
Violence
War and bloodshed
Weapons (guns, knives, etc.)
Witchcraft, sorcery, etc.

If you really want to make high schoolers uncomfortable, how about “algebra” and “molecules” and…and…homework?

Removing any mention of the word “evolution” from the curriculum rather effectively decapitates the teaching of biology; “celebrities”, not so much, but it’s bizarre that they put that word on a par with “slavery”. How do they talk about American history without mentioning slavery?

Can America get any more racist?

My flight home yesterday wasn’t great. I was generally feeling exhausted, and then in the airport, I made the mistake of watching the giant televisions they mount all over the waiting areas. You know, the giant televisions that apparently represent American political thought to every person on the planet who happens to travel through one of our airports. And the news was all about Trayvon Martin. Not about the injustice of a young black man being killed in the prime of his life; not about ghastly gun laws that justify murder; not about the bigotry of the police, who saw a dead black man and a vigilante standing over him, and shrugged their shoulders and let the vigilante walk away; no, different concerns engaged our brilliant news media.

Trayvon Martin had been discovered with an empty baggie that once contained marijuana. Uh, what? Does that matter? Are we now going to declare that past trivial legal offenses justify the death penalty now? If I gunned down that odious racist Dan Riehl, I think I could trust that a little digging would discover that perhaps he had a parking ticket somewhere in his sordid past, or perhaps he shaved the truth on his tax returns. I don’t know of any such crimes, but I’m confident that we could find something ex post facto to slime his reputation and rationalize anything I might do to him. That is, if I thought I was commissioned to act as an executioner for crimes that have not been tried, with the right to deliver the Maximum Penalty for even the pettiest of crimes.

It’s all very Judge Dredd.

And that’s not all! Maybe you’ve seen the usual photo of Trayvon Martin as a smiling young kid in a t-shirt; that’s a sneaky effort used by “hysterical race baiters” to portray him as a normal human being, which he isn’t, because he’s black. So they’ve ginned up photos of random black teenagers (they all look the same, you know) in sagging pants and posturing rudely, all to show how the real Martin conforms to their stereotypes. Or they show other photos of Martin when he’s wearing a hoodie and not smiling…because the sullen black man is dangerous. He better be smiling, and even prancing and singing, or apparently he deserves to be shot.

This seems to be the new strategy of the racist right: if they can show that Trayvon Martin wasn’t like Beaver Cleaver, then they can justify the murder. Trayvon Martin’s crime was not being white enough. They’re going to use this incident to put the whole of black culture — every bit of that diverse group that doesn’t conform to the mandatory Dick and Jane universe — on trial. Black Americans, you better practice smiling real big; you better put away that Wu-Tang Clan stuff and learn to love 1001 Strings and Pat Boone.

That was my ten minutes of outrage in the airport. It made me wonder whether black people might feel a little bit estranged when they step into a giant building like that with huge screens everywhere blaring racist apologetics.

I tuned it out before I ripped the armrest off my chair and started smashing expensive electronics everywhere, and turned to my iPad and the soothing rationality of the internet.

Then I read Jezebel.

Oh, fuck.

OK, people, did you really think pointing me to Crommunist’s post would make me feel better?

I guess she really doesn’t like evolution

I’m giving a midterm exam on evolution this morning. I hope none of the students snap.

Associate Professor Stephen M. Kajiura was reviewing with his evolution class in GS 120 for a midterm when FAU student Jonatha Carr interrupted him: “How does evolution kill black people?” she asked. Kajiura attempted to explain that evolution doesn’t kill anyone.

And then, Carr became violent.

A fellow classmate, Rachel Bustamante, was sitting behind Carr prior to her outburst and noticed she had been avoiding looking at the professor until 11:35 a.m. — that’s when she snapped. The classmate reported that Kajiura was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her question about evolution. She asked it four times, and became increasingly upset each time Kajiura’s answer failed to satisfy her.

…fuckin’ evolution, I hate this shit.…You better shut the fuck up, before I fuckin’ kill you!

Exam time really is kind of stressful for the students.

Are you 4th year med students experiencing stress or something?

Tomorrow is match day for med students — they’re all competing for residencies, and apparently, it leads some of them to make comparisons with the upcoming movie, The Hunger Games.

(That’s a former student of mine, Katie Glasrud, playing the role of Katniss. She’ll do fine. If the Match is anything like the Hunger Games, though, her fellow students ought to worry about getting killed!)

It takes a humor site to speak the truth

If it is said by an filthy rich stock market jerk screaming on the trading floor, it makes the news. If it is said by a pompous thug with a cigar in his mouth on talk radio, it gets play. But those kinds of people all lie to serve their greedy self-interest; only a comedian can rip through the self-serving absurdity and point out the insanity. So here’s Cracked.com dismantling 6 excuses the obscenely rich use to justify inequity. It’s good. Here’s a sample:

So when I say “We’re all in this together,” I’m not stating a philosophy. I’m stating a fact about the way human life works. No, you never asked for anything to be handed to you. You didn’t have to, because billions of humans who lived and died before you had already created a lavish support system where the streets are all but paved with gold. Everyone reading this — all of us living in a society advanced enough to have Internet access — was born one inch away from the finish line, plopped here at birth, by other people.

So when somebody else asks for your help, in the form of charity or taxes, or because they need you to help them move a refrigerator, you can cite all sorts of reasons for not helping (“I think you’re lying about needing help” or “I don’t care” or “I’m too tied up with my own problems”), but the one thing you can’t say is, “Why should you need help? I’ve never gotten help!” Not unless you’re either shamefully oblivious, or a lying asshole.

Every word is truth.

All you have to know about the Limbaugh affair

Just go read The Rude Pundit. He’s got Limbaugh pegged. He also has a somewhat realistic prediction for the aftermath.

And thus Limbaugh will go on, damaged, but unbowed. He’s now tainted, but you can bet that all of his listeners see him as the victim here and that, six months, a year from now, nearly all of those sponsors will be back. But maybe, just maybe, he will be poisonous enough to be nothing more than a deranged cult leader, a deaf and dumb and dying dinosaur in the tar pit of his fading career.

The Rude Pundit being optimistic? Wow. I don’t think the poison will daunt his fans — they wallow in that stuff.

I am so glad I’m a science professor

I assign a fair bit of writing in my courses, but because it’s all about biology, the papers I get back might be full of cryptic words like mek and src and neoplasia, but they tend to have a straightforward narrative and avoid ambiguity…and since I’m at a good liberal arts college, most of the students are competent writers. But then every once in a while I get a glimpse from my colleagues of the world outside my mechanistic and straightforward world, and I feel a small thrill of horror. You should read the whole student essay, but here’s the concluding paragraph.

Because knowing what it knows now, it will never know peace. It will only know humiliation. For there are no limits on the number of Grade Change forms I can request, or if there are, I plan to collect them like an ignorant naturalist on a well-trodden shore and submit them in perpetuity.

Yeesh. The tortured syntax, the ambiguous referents, the vague threat of drowning the poor victim in paperwork…I do not want to live in that universe.

But still, this one is still the all-time champion worst.