(With apologies for the digressions in the initial version....)
About six years ago, I was walking down the streets of Provincetown, Mass, thinking, "I wonder if the Taliban is going to come down here and do a raid on a gay bar?" Maybe THAT's why that woman sitting next to us in the audience in which we were watching the comic Leah DeLaria had such a long skirt on?
When I wrote about the loss of Michael Gonzales (INNOCENT BYSTANDERS), I shielded myself from thinking about another kind of loss familiar to probably every New York City public school teacher: the loss of students who are in the armed forces. Just in the past year, one of my first students, by now a 41 year old father of three, signed up for his National Guard in Utah. I expect, like those men and women from Massachusets who were deployed today to Afghanistan, he will be sent off to "do construction projects and bolster our nation's security around the world," as the reporter said at the end of the feature story which popped up after the one about the "yellow lobster" which was actually what had brought me to the Yahoo News site.
It kind of reminded me of my last visit to Provincetown during which my friend Karen did have lobster and during which I did not once think about terrorists of any kind. It's funny. We were actually pushed out of New York airspace that night because then President Bush was leaving New York just after his speech to the Republican convention. If he, or anyone had really thought there were terrorists en route to or from Massachusets, we shouldn't have been able to hear Air Force One ask for permission for take off. Let's see, he wasn't leaving JFK...probably he was leaving from White Plains and anyone with a friend who had a plane and was in the air at that moment knew exactly when. But, I digress...kind of. It's a great party story. Losing my students has become too popular a blog story.
It's not just the possibility of their deaths which upsets me and my own feelings about the futility of this war, but the cycle which lead them to choose the armed forces as a career. NOT ONE had ever told me that he/she dreamed about being a soldier. Serving your country is an honor which I do not mean to denigrate. The fact is that our economy has driven some of my smartest students to do tours of Afghanistan and Iraq. They tell me they are okay and they are proud of their work. First and foremost, they wanted to be working in challenging professions. They wanted to be in positions of leadership. Trying to balance college and supporting their families wasn't the only deterrent which kept them from making alternative choices. The reality that they could turn around after all that hard academic work and find an economy poised on grinding down their bodies and spirits without even benefits was a risk they found to profoundly painful to accept. It's a fate worse than death. Literally.
For all the time we spend debating the morality of the works of literature they read, whether children can read about gay parents when they probably watch them on TV anyway, we don't spend enough time arguing about what vocational skills we are giving our students. The liberal education was intended to free the mind. When it was conceived, it presumed a life in scholarship, law or the priesthood. Of those three professions, only the last offers any security and ladder of promotion. I'm not being facetious; I mean to speak in the plainest terms possible. No matter how much reading, writing and arithmetic are essential to survival, they are not enough. No matter how beautifully conceived a research project is for an honors class, it is not enough. Getting a 5 on the AP of anything, is not enough. Very few doctors and lawyers today can break out into practices of their own. And if they do, who helps them when, in their first years, they can't afford to fix things or can't afford classes which will help them compete in the marketplace. But these are, by far, not the weakest members of our economy. Take the "A" student with an MA and PhD in Comparative Literature. Who knew that he/she would likely teach classes the way women and men in sweatshops sewed garments -- both groups would be paid for "piecework." Most scholars have to teach and get paid by the class -- 3000 a pop. So, if you could teach ten classes a term, you could earn, before taxes, about 30,000. There are some people who are lucky enough to find tenure track jobs which often start at salaries in the 20 and 30 thousand dollar range. I hear that outside of New York, you can possibly survive on that, but that's not equitable payment for someone who has spent 8 years after high school dedicated to any field.
I'm not worried JUST about those kids who fail their exams. What I'm worried about is that BOTH the kids who do well and those who don't will be joining the National Guard whether they like it or not because they won't have many options.
When my doctor asks me if the book I am reading, Simon Schama's AMERICA'S FUTURE tells if we are going to become "The United States of China," I'm a bit embarrassed. Schama is tracing our ideas of what an American is -- but is that question even in the "bottom line" anymore? Goldman Sachs isn't treasonous when it makes choices which destroy the power of our economy and our government. But, when we bargain for fair treatment as teachers --whether it be for money or respect--we are vilified in the press. We rarely get to argue whether we WANT to be the United States of China. Besides our loss of money and power, what else do we care about in that equation? How can we care, for example, about our potential job losses to new immigrants and to our growing bad credit, when we haven't even faced the fact that Americans lose these jobs because they no longer pay a fair wage and that we keep borrowing money to fix an economy which needs serious re-envisioning? What do we want our children to be? What choices are we creating now for them to consider in the future?
I'm sure some of my students clicked on the story about the Yellow lobster and then went on to the story about the National Guard. Do you think they wondered why so many young and not-so-young people had joined a part of our military which people don't usually hear about? Do you think they wondered why many of them were people of color?
But, it doesn't get so far in the minds of a ten year old and maybe not always in a that of a tenth grader, who may, instead be wondering how you fish for lobster, why are yellow lobsters rare and can we go to Red Lobster tomorrow? And the practical questions of the trade as well as the marine biology are things they should understand. When they fight us off so hard, they do so both because they sometimes find us too hard and too irrelevant. They believe we are supposed to be training them for the hard work and all the possibilities of adulthood? We are supposed to be helping them find life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
Are we?
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