Happy Birthday, Saint Marge

 

Today would have been my mother’s 88th birthday. She was born in 1923 in Homestead, Florida, 30 miles south of Miami down Dixie Highway (US Highway 1) through orange, mango and avocado groves and the occasional alligator infested swamp. She was the second of five children, only the oldest of whom still survives, my Aunt Frances who now lives in Pensacola.

My mother died five years ago this March. By the time she died, many of my friends had taken to calling her Saint Marge. There was much in her history which suggested sainthood was, indeed, in order.

She had put up with my hard-headed Dad and three of us strong-willed children for 55 years. She had survived killer hurricanes of the late 20s and early 30s in Dade County (including the one that washed away her friends in Islamorada who were aboard the train fleeing the killer storm up the Overseas Highway through the Keys). She had survived the loss of her baby brother to alcoholism. He died at 51.

Saint Marge had managed to run an entire USDA office as its clerk for about 30 years, repeatedly hitting the glass ceiling in federal circles, never receiving her due reward for her labors and leadership, always standing in the background when the office received award after award based upon her hard work. But she enjoyed the result of that hard work when she was able to travel all around the world with my Dad upon their retirement.

My mother was one of the most courageous women I have ever known. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1988, braving a radical mastectomy, a second removal of scar tissue, round after round of chemotherapy and radiation. In the end, she simply wasted away. But she fought to live right up to the day she died.

I tell people I come from a long line of strong women. My mother was decidedly one of them. She had been among the handful of coeds who broke the gender barrier at the University of Florida in 1948 when its long reign as a male only university ended. She endured the taunts of the frat boys sensing their unearned privilege was about to be challenged, taunts which combined sexism with racism: “The maids are gettin’ whiter every day.”

But it was there that she met my father and left school after two years to get married. Mother only managed an Associate degree out of that and took classes wherever she could the rest of her life. She would type and retype and retype my father’s master’s thesis from the UF College of Agriculture in 1954, typing the manuscript out on a manual typewriter while attending to a one year old child, myself, and living in former military barracks moved to the campus and charmingly called the FlaVets.

Within a year of my dad’s graduation, she’d give birth to my brother, a baby born with a partial cleft palate and numerous health problems that would result in five surgeries by the time he was five years old. She would endure years of vicarious pain watching him suffer the abuse by the children in our small town and the grown ups who should have known better. And at 40, amidst the thalidomide scare of 1962 (Mom wouldn’t even take aspirin during her pregnancy) she gave birth to my sister.

Perhaps the most striking aspect about my mother was how other people responded to her. My sister repeated something at her funeral (the three homilies were delivered by her children, at her request) we had heard all of our lives: “You have such a nice mother.” And it was true. She was unbelievably pleasant to the many people who came through her office at the Farmer’s Home Administration whether they were drunk, rude or civil. She was temperate in her judgments and long in compassion in her interactions with her fellow churchmen and women at First United Methodist of Bushnell where she sang in the choir for four decades. And she was the face of motherly love, compassion and a fierce mother lion protectiveness when it came to the three of us.

For my mother, the cardinal sin was “being ugly.” I don’t have to explain that to Southern children. But for the uninitiated, it simply means not using vulgar language and being cordial regardless of circumstance in one’s dealings with others. I wish I could say her son has perfected those skills. Those who know me will quickly say otherwise. But I am trying. And, in all honesty, when I say things I know my mother would frown at and shake her head, I can honestly hear her voice inside my head saying, “Now, son, don’t be ugly.” And I often reply, “I’m trying, Momma.”

The common wisdom is that time heals all wounds. While it is true that I do not mourn my mother’s passing each moment of the day as I did at first, the missing chunk of my heart that was my mother has not grown particularly insensitive over time. I hear her voice in my aunt and my sister’s voices as they speak. I hear her laugh - so readily delighted in the small joys of our world from small children to old people snoring - in my own laughter. And I watch my father tear up as he remembers his lost soul mate and I turn away so he will not see me cry.

Indeed, there are times I find myself saying, “Mother, I miss you. I really miss you” as if that urgent appeal to the gods will somehow bring her back though I know that it won’t. Time has not healed this wound. The jagged edges of my heart where my mother once resided have simply devolved to a dull, painful place that springs to life periodically when I smell my mother’s perfume and see her image amidst the many photos making up the Tree of Life composite on the wall at the foot of my bed. And while I know my mother would not want any of us to be sad over her absence, it’s difficult not to miss having a saint in your midst.

In my home I maintain four altars facing each the four directions, each with a different purpose. My south altar is my family altar with the photos of my family of birth and family of choice as well as the non-human animal family members I have loved over the years. This day as I placed the incense in the bowl beneath my mother’s wedding photo, I whispered “Thank you, Momma.”

So Happy Birthday, St. Marge. Know you are missed. Know your life has shaped the world in a very wonderful way. Know that you were one of G-d’s best creations. But most of all, know that your eldest child still loves you and misses you more than you could ever know. More than that, know how grateful he is for all you did to make him who he is.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Naïve, Simplistic and Tucson – Part II

Coming to Grips with our Murderous Culture

I observe there are a lot of contributing factors to this criminogenic composite that has become 21st CE America. Clearly the political rhetoric which dehumanizes others and constructs them as enemies of the people if not of G-d himself is a part of the problem. Again, it is naïve to suggest that we can flood our airwaves with such misanthropic vitriol and have no result from it. But I would also observe that this pattern is hardly relegated to Rush, Sara and the Fox Fearmongers.

Lyndon Johnson was elected president in 1964 with the Daisy ad depicting a little girl plucking petals from a daisy while a nuclear countdown proceeded in the background. The ad ended with a mushroom cloud and the directive to keep Johnson’s hand on the nuclear strike buttons, a demonization of Republican Barry Goldwater as a nuclear crazed hawk. Richard Nixon would return that favor in 1968 with his Southern strategy which painted crime in racist terms insuring a white Southern electorate’s favor in the election. It worked like a charm.

In 1980, GOP challenger Ronald Reagan set the tone for a tectonic shift which would result from painting government as the enemy. His campaign gave Americans permission to think in strictly self-focused terms asking them “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” According to Roth’s formula, the focus on self to the exclusion of the other – much less the common good – and the cynical beginning point of mistrust of government is a recipe for murder.

1980 marked the beginning of a shift from American self-conception as citizens to consumers. The former see themselves in terms of duties: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” (JFK, Inaugural speech 1961). The latter see themselves in terms of self-gain, avoidance of duties to others, indeed, of consideration of the other much at all. Kohlberg’s Stage 2 Pre-Conventional moral reasoning (What’s in it for me?) is heard daily in the consumer advertising with which we are all pounded: “Obey your thirst! Just DO it! Talk all the time!”

But political rhetoric is not the only place self-focus and distrust of the other is expressed. I observe that the self-focus in the ways we see ourselves and our government mirrors the approach of evangelical Protestantism, heavily focused on individual personal relationships with Christ and ultimate existential concerns about salvation in the afterlife to the exclusion of virtually all else.

I see it in the meteoric rise of Pentecostal megachurches with their self-focused “Name it and claim it” prosperity theologies. “God wants you to be prosperous” asserts Joel Osteen who has made his millions on the backs of working class would-be millionaires. A god who is all about the individual (when he’s not blessing the murderous rampages of the tribe in places like Iraq and Afghanistan) serves as a ready legitimation for almost any action which furthers those goals.

I also observe that the scourge of guns which provides the means for the world’s most murderous nation to carry out its bloody business each day as well as serving as the world’s largest exporters of the machinery of death is yet one more manifestation of the fear of the other (lack of fellow-feeling, per Roth), distrust of government and the ultimate expression of individuality in this hyperindividualistic culture. Gun owners always seek to legitimate the ownership and the use of the weaponry of war under the rubric of self-defense. But the statistics regarding their use suggest something very different.

Madison’s preamble clearly pointed toward “provid[ing] for the common (as opposed to the individual) defense” of Americans generally and his Second Amendment clearly was based in a concern for the common protection provided by “a well-armed militia” and NOT for an atomistic, distrustful citizenry armed to the teeth. The current pattern of gun ownership and usage in America suggests that it is the individualistic impulse which has come to dominate the role of guns in our nation. America’s obsession over guns reflects a fear of the other. It also reflects a preoccupation with self.

Even our use of technology reflects the focus on self to the exclusion – and sometimes at the expense – of others. The flame wars in which disembodied names on screens become the target of incredibly abusive behaviors is but one example of the deadly narcissism combined with indifference to the other that Roth sees as essential ingredients for a murderous culture. And the net has also become the big silver screen on which all of our anti-social pathologies are daily projected from political sites featuring gun cross-hairs on politicians later actually shot to sites marked by religious zealotry advocating violence against whole groups of people like Matthew Shephard and Kansas physician George Tiller to sites urging self-appointed “patriots” like Timothy McVeigh to engage in terrorist activities against his own countrymen and women.

The implication of Roth’s study appears to be that if America wishes to come to grips with its violent nature – a huge if given our seemingly willing acquiescence to that violence as somehow normal for our daily lives – we must first consider the attitudes and understandings which give rise to it. That would mean coming to doubt the unquestioned “wisdom” of self-interest as the driving force of interaction with the world. It would mean critically reappraising our attitudes toward government and our duties to the same in a democratic society. It would mean exercising control over the tidal wave of media blather complete with its hyperindividualizing consumer advertising which washes over us daily.

In the face of such an enormous undertaking, there is a natural tendency to disingenuously describe the reluctance to exert the energy, patience and endurance necessary to accomplish it as somehow meaning that such is impossible. There is a world of difference between an honest “I don’t want to be bothered” with a dishonest “We could never do that” which seeks to legitimate laziness. The question that remains, as I see it, is simply when we Americans will decide that a world made existentially insecure by a violence which we have the means to at least diminish if not substantially eliminate becomes ultimately untenable.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Orlando
 http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Naïve, Simplistic and Tucson – Part I



Fellow-Feeling, an onus against Uncle Sam and Murder

In the wake of the murder of a federal judge, a nine year old girl and a handful of others in an attempt to kill Congresswoman Gabbie Gifford in Tucson, Arizona, a spate of reciprocal finger pointing has erupted. Some progressives sought to blame hatemongers like Rush Limbaugh and tea pots like Sara Palin for the carnage arguing that without the violent political rhetoric -which in Palin’s case went so far as to train gun crosshairs on the congresswoman’s district - this would not have occurred. Not surprisingly, self-righteous conservatives immediately objected to attempts to blame them. Never underestimate the ability of conservatives to play the martyr. And, true to form, they took the usual acontextual tack of demonizing a rogue individual while asserting that it’s precisely folks like these that evidence the need for even more guns in a culture inebriated with the mechanisms of death.

I had to shake my head with sadness over the event and the responses. It’s hard to get too worked up emotionally over events like Tucson these days when killing fields like Columbine and Virginia Tech have become so commonplace that the yellow ribbons and candlelight vigils have become little more than maudlin cliché, a shallow public dramaturgy which often adds insult to the injuries of lost human lives. The reality is that America has come to accept this kind of carnage as an expectable part of living in this self-proclaimed “land of the free” (really? Does Tucson suggest that Americans are really free? Isn’t freedom from the constant threat of lethal violence a rather primordial freedom which precedes all others?)

Clearly, our weapon-sodden culture is a part of the problem. America legally arms its people to the teeth with everything from concealable pistols to multiple targeting weapons of war and then expresses shock and dismay when people actually use them on each other. We also seem to be able to even slow down this deadly pattern, much less stop it. We talk about our problem in abstract terms of rights and idealized visions of self-defense. And as a result we are polarized between those who would simplistically see guns as the root cause of all social evils and those whose denial about the harm these firearms cause boast of an unquestionable ability of the average individual to defend him or herself when attacked.

These are the rather classic marks of a deadly addiction. America’s love affair with firearms has become increasingly pathological over time. And I see its unwillingness to admit that it has a problem even in the face of events like Tucson as one more sign that American culture has simply not been willing to mature out of its long-term bratty, defensive adolescence.

There was no small amount of irony in the NPR news stories the same week as the shootings which reported that the vast majority of guns being used in the drug-related crime in nearby Mexico are legally bought in two American states - Texas and Arizona, whose residents dress up to play soldiers riding up and down the borders in their pickup trucks, toting their weapons of war. They see it as their self-appointed duty to keep America safe from those they would caricaturize as “illegals.” Their states have passed draconian laws against Mexican immigrants which, in turn, have been fueled by fear of the violence resulting when their own guns come back across the border in the hands of drug runners. As my mother would say, this is a pretty good case of cutting one’s nose off to spite one’s face.

Arizona’s huge chip on its shoulder about everything from immigrants to Martin Luther King, Jr. to guns has a long history. The Los Angeles Times reported this week that while Arizonans see their current gun laws as somehow an outgrowth of their state’s cowboy history, in fact the gun laws in Tombstone during the period in which the famed shootout at the OK Corral occurred were much more stringent than today’s Arizona. Indeed, the cause of the shootout, which seems to have occurred in an alley rather than a corral, was apparently the local sheriff’s attempt to enforce the territory’s laws against carrying guns in public. Wonder what Wyatt Earp might have done with Jared Loughner.

However, I do not see guns as the besetting sin giving rise to Tucson. Legally purchased guns in a gun-crazed state currently contemplating allowing concealed weapons on college campuses were simply the means by which Jared Loughner is alleged to have carried out his bloody rampage but they were not the cause.

Ironically, it is the subsequent sparring over political rhetoric which is actually closer to the cause of this event than probably either of the contending parties realizes. To suggest that the dehumanizing rhetoric of the right which is fairly consistently laced with appeals to violence such as “the second amendment option” (meaning killing those identified as enemies who cannot be defeated at the polls) had no impact on the shootings in Tucson is naïve at best. As Jesse Jackson says, “A text without a context is a pretext.” Nothing occurs in a vacuum.

But to suggest that the political rhetoric alone is responsible for a mentally ill assailant going on a murderous rampage is simplistic. It confuses context for motive and seeks to connect dots that have some major gaps between them. It also suggests that the solution for the problem is simply to insure that political debate is civil and such events will not recur in the future. As Albert Einstein said, “Things should be seen as simply as possible but no more so.” Beyond simple explanations lies the realm of forced answers of the simplistic variety.

This month’s Christian Century carried a review of Ohio State history professor Randolph Roth’s massive study of American Homicide. Roth rejects the leap from correlation to causation in arguments about guns, poverty, drugs and all the many easy answers that American criminologists, economists and sociologists have offered the public over the past century as explanations for the world’s most murderous society. But he takes the concerns over political rhetoric very seriously. Indeed, he argues that it’s precisely when such divisive, dehumanizing rhetoric has been present in our nation’s history, our murder rates have been correspondingly at their highest. Conversely, it’s when Americans have seen each other as fellow Americans, seeking to work together to solve national problems from the Great Depression to the Second World War, that murder rates have plummeted.

Roth makes four general assertions correlating murder rates with public perceptions. He observes that murder rates drop when the following perceptions are held by the public:

1.The belief that government is stable and that its legal and judicial institutions are unbiased and will redress wrongs and protect lives and people.

2. A feeling of trust in government and the officials who run it, and a belief in their legitimacy.

3. Patriotism, empathy and fellow feeling arising from racial, religious or political solidarity.

4. The belief that the social hierarchy is legitimate, that one’s position in society is or can be satisfactory and that one can command the respect of others without resorting to violence.

In short, it matters greatly how we see our countrymen and women – all of them. It matters how we envision our government and our relationship – including our duties – to it. It matters whether people believe they can anticipate justice from their dealings with government and business alike and whether the system insures they have a chance for actually realizing their aspirations or whether it is tipped against them.

Roth bases these four observations on his well documented studies of American jurisdictions over the life history of the nation beginning in colonial times. Of the 651 total pages, nearly 200 are devoted to sources and documentation. This man has clearly done his homework.

And yet, his conclusion seems rather obvious. When people have acquiesced to a rather mindless mistrust of their governments (because no one is born fearing governments) it’s likely they will see them as illegitimate and thus targeting its leaders – like Gabbie Gifford - should not be surprising. When people have come to distrust others, to see themselves in hyperindividualist terms competing in “a war of all against all” in Hobbesian terms, it should not be surprising that murder rates would soar. When one believes themselves to have no duties to the other, beginning with a respect of their dignity, there would be little reason not to kill the other if their murder comes to be seen as a means or an obstacle to self-gratification. And when a people come to believe that the American dream of self-actualization that every American schoolchild was taught is little more than a cynical, hollow deception, murder should not be a surprising expression of the resulting cognitive dissonance.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Shatter Your Mirrors!

Among the many tributes offered this week upon the death of Sargent Shriver, founder of the Peace Corps and former vice-presidential candidate, I found a quotation from a commencement speech Shriver made at Yale University in 1994. It bears wisdom well worth repeating.

Shriver said:

“Break your mirrors! Yes, indeed — shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor, and less about your own.

I suggest this: when you get to be 30, 40, 50, or even 70 years old, you’ll get more happiness and contentment out of counting your friends than counting your dollars. You’ll get more satisfaction from having improved your neighborhood, your town, your state, your country and your fellow human beings than you’ll ever get from your muscles, your figure, your automobile, your house, or your credit ratings.

You’ll get more from being a peacemaker than a warrior. I’ve been both, so I speak from experience. Break the mirrors! Be peacemakers of the community, and you and your family will be happy.”

Perhaps it’s a case of Jungian synchronicity that I found this quote while currently reading the book of interviews with the Dalai Lama in which he discusses The Art of Happiness. Howard Cutler, the psychotherapist who conducts the interviews which form the basis for the book, asks His Holiness how he defines a psychologically healthy person. The Dalai Lama answers as follows:

If you maintain a feeling of compassion, loving kindness, then something automatically opens your inner door. Through that, you can communicate much more easily with other people. And that feeling of warmth creates a kind of openness. You’ll find that all human beings are just like you, so you’ll be able to relate to them more easily.

Like Shriver, HHDL recognizes that it is precisely by breaking the mirrors of self-absorption that human beings grow and develop into psychologically healthy persons. And, ironically, it is precisely the self-focused, mistrustful approaches to the world that their holders would presume to define as realism that lead to suffering.

Shriver’s admonition to shatter the mirrors of self-absorption delivered to students graduating from Yale, one of the national epitomes of privilege and the inordinate sense of entitlement that goes with it, could hardly have been much more on target. What might the world look like if the sons and daughters of America’s elite class actually used their unearned privilege complete with the access to power it by definition includes for the purpose of addressing the enormous problems facing our world today?

But it is hardly just the future George Bushes of America, the winners of genetic lotteries and the unearned privilege of social location at birth, who need to hear this call to consciousness. About the same time Shriver was making his appeal to the largely WASP aristocracy in New Haven, I had a chance to hear Princeton ethicist Cornell West speaking to a crowd at Florida A&M University across town in Tallahassee from Florida State University where I was finishing my doctoral work. West told the packed auditorium of students of color “Your biggest challenge in life is finding something larger than yourself to devote your lives to.” We all prone to gaze into solipsistic mirrors in a narcissistic culture. And all of them require shattering.

I see the cult of Narcissus daily in my work at the university. It’s evident in the approach students are increasingly using for choosing classes: online slam sites that reduce professors to how easy their tests are, how much work they demand and whether they require students to think critically, something many seem desperate to avoid at all costs. I see it in the reluctance many students have to working in groups with other students, so terrified that “my grade will suffer” and “I might have to do all the work.” And it screams from strategic approaches to learning that seek to do the least amount required for the highest grade possible and whine like hell when required to do anything beyond the minimum.

The obsession with self which motivates these behaviors is apparent. Indeed, the entire misguided approach to college as a means to attaining working papers (translation: making money) rather than the opportunity to actually become educated human beings capable of contributing to the social world in which we live is little more than an extended worship at the altar of Narcissus.

Increasingly, I wonder if America, this country I simultaneously love deeply at the same time I grieve over its active pursuit of mediocrity, is not suffering from a chronic case of delayed development. “What’s in it for me?” is the mark of stage two pre-conventional moral reasoning. We expect to see this kind of moral calculus among pre-teenaged children and among people whose moral development has been stunted by abuse as children, many of them ending up in our prisons and mental institutions.

But we also have come to expect such thinking from our consumer advertising industry whose mantras to “Just do it!,” “Obey your thirst” and “Talk all the time” pound us daily for hours on end. While we demand that our children grow up, we have acquiesced to a culture of childish thinking. And increasingly our own children are reflecting that acquiescence, peering into mirrors of self-absorption.

All of us have much to learn from these thinkers. And much rides on our willingness to learn. The chances are that most of us will not say when death draws near that we wish we had worked a little harder to buy a few more new clothes or cars. Most of us won’t speak of regretting insufficient hours for the gym or the mall. And few will sorrowfully consider the lost opportunities to create and purvey self-serving facades on social networking sites in mortis examine.

But Shriver, the Dalai Lama and West all recognize something even more essential in their offerings to us. We live in a world where alienated peoples respond with terrorist attacks, where displaced peoples pour across artificial national boundaries to escape the inevitability of death in war-torn and economically devastated homelands. And we live on a planet where our mother nature is responding to human abuse of her weary body by simply making it impossible for humans to reside in ever larger swatches of the planet’s surface. Shattering mirrors of self-absorption is increasingly urgent for human survival and for the health of Earth, our island home.

Clearly, neither Shriver’s nor West’s messages were heard in 1994. And the recent debate over media civility and its role in creating a context for the Tucson shooting suggest that HHDL’s call to allow our inner doors to open to compassion has gone unheeded. Certainly it is unreasonable to insist that a culture change overnight. It has taken a long time for American culture to become the mirror gazing narcissistic culture that today presents itself to the world. And shifting our gaze from self to the world around us will not occur without effort, perseverance and patience. But the time has come to begin. And the stakes are high should we refuse.


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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com


If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Entitlement, Immaturity, Self-Focus – God Bless America?

The driver in front of me on the narrow main drag through Winter Park, Orlando’s affluent enclave of Republican old money, was taking his time this morning. Cell phone in hand, he was more than willing to make everyone behind his oversized SUV wait while he continued his telephone conversation oblivious to the world.

On the bumper of his obstructing obscenity were two stickers. The one on the left read “So many species. So little time.” To its right was a faded sticker which read “God Bless America.” Pardon me while I retch.

Of course, the traffic impeding cell phone conversation, the oversized earth destroying vehicle - which takes up more than its share of the highway, guzzles more than its share of the gas and kills more than its share of fellow travelers in accidents – and the bumper stickers are all of a piece, ultimately. They point toward self-centeredness. And they point toward an enormous sense of entitlement for no apparent reason.

I have often posed this question to my students: When we say “God Bless America,” what do we mean by it? Is it a humble request? a statement of entitlement? an assertion of perceived fact? Is such a blessing exclusive to America or simply one of the many nation-states who perceive divine legitimation of their enterprise? And if the former, why would God “shed his grace on thee” to the exclusion of other nations composed of G-d’s creatures like ourselves?

But, perhaps more important is the question of why G-d would bless a people so incredibly self-focused, a people possessed of a spirit of such enormous entitlement that they would look upon their fellow species of G-d’s creation as theirs for the taking, if not wasting? What would merit such a blessing? Indeed, what would justify withholding of deprivation - if not punishment - for such immature attitudes and resulting destructive behaviors?

A child screaming “MINE!” and grasping at everyone’s toys is bearable if not expectable at four. We presume that with proper correction and guidance, the child will eventually grow up. But an adult who is still stuck in Stage 2 pre-conventional moral reasoning (What’s in it for me?) at a point when the time for maturity has long since arrived is not only unbearable, that situation merits castigation. There is nothing respectable about unabated greed and self-focus in an adult who should know better. And wrapping it in a flag and invoking the presumed favor of the deity makes it no more respectable, it simply compounds immaturity with intellectual dishonesty.

Increasingly, the world no longer has the luxury of this kind of immaturity. The species are, in fact, disappearing. And ultimately, even our own species will have its own turn in that disappearing act if we do not change direction soon. As Thomas Jefferson said about America’s self-indulgent immaturity regarding slavery in his own day, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever." One wonders what the author of creation might have to say to the representatives of the species who destroyed the earth's biosphere at judgment day. Somehow I have to doubt it will be a blessing.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Very Revealing….” – II

“That’s just your opinion…”

[Continued]

“the professor is very liberal. Read his blog. It is revealing.”

While I appreciate this plug for my blog and I welcome my students along with the rest of the world to read it (what other reason would anyone blog in the first place?), the plug’s juxtaposition to the comment “he’s very liberal” suggests that the invitation to read the blog has an agenda. So, a little context and critical thinking here, please.

First, this comment occurs in a culture where trade unions have been emasculated, where the major providers of news are controlled by a handful of global corporations with vested interests in a particular presentation of information and where the opinion polls consistently show that those who label their ideological inclinations conservative by far outweigh the fairly small number who have the temerity to own up to being liberal. What does liberal mean in such a context?

Anyone who has been outside the US – even across the border into our neighboring nations in either direction – knows that American culture is decidedly skewed to the right and lacks any kind of real counterpart to the far right voices which regularly find a place on talk shows and in editorial columns. When moderate means liberal and mere left of center is deemed socialist, calling someone “very liberal” probably says more about the labeler than the one they would sum up.

Second, while I would readily admit to holding what in American terms is a liberal perspective on a number of issues, (I am frequently nonplussed to find myself viewed as conservative in my trips to Latin America) ironically, the issue at hand is decidedly not among them.

In American pedagogy today, a consumerist vision of minimal expectations coupled with maximal entitlement reigns and the unquestionable worship of technocratic means such as online technologies and multiple choice exams which provide quick and easy results (and major opportunities to cheat) are the norm. In such a context, a college instructor who insists his students actually read the texts assigned, creates assignments to insure they do and that they come to class prepared to actually participate once there, who still takes attendance and doesn’t allow students to engage in rude, distracting behaviors with their technological toys is not a liberal. He’s a true conservative, holding students to traditional standards of behavior, manners, performance and insisting upon individual accountability.

But perhaps most troubling about this comment is the unarticulated but clearly indicated normative understanding of how college classes should be taught. If “he’s very liberal” suggests something out of the ordinary as it appears to here, clearly the expectation is that the instructor – if not the class – is supposed to be conservative in orientation. Why would that be?

Of course, this unarticulated, perhaps even unconscious, presumption is not terribly surprising given that the subject of the course is religion. While increasing numbers of Gen Y students are joining the ranks of the “none of the above” when asked to describe their religion, Americans who remain attached to religious institutions increasingly tend to be the most conservative in their belief systems.

If I had to guess, based upon the comments they made in class and in their self-descriptions in written assignments, I’d say that about a third of this class held to some kind of evangelical to fundamentalist Protestant views with another quarter of them holding to rather conservative Roman Catholic views. In short, over half of the students enrolled were identifiably conservative in their religious inclinations coming into the class. No doubt a class which demands people critically consider their foregone conclusions about religion provided a bumpy semester long ride for a number of them.

That conservative bent was reflected in the comments of about the same number of students in their end of term reviews for the honors college which suggested they did not feel comfortable offering their opinion in class given what they perceived the opinion of the instructor to be. While this recovering lawyer admits to the potential of engaging in a little cross-examination during discussions in class from time to time, it is, in fact, the job of the instructor of any academic study of religion to prompt students to think critically about their views. That most students have never had to do so previously, find they have little to say about the religions most of them have simply inherited and become uncomfortable when required to do so does not somehow exempt them from that obligation. Nor does it make their instructor an opinionated tyrant.

Not just any opinion....

This concern about opinion also points toward a couple of other issues. Clearly, it is true that I, along with most other graduate educated college instructors, do have opinions about various aspects of our subject matter. Indeed, that is precisely a major reason we endured so many years of long and costly higher education - to be able to offer an educated opinion on our given areas of expertise informed by our own studies and reflection as well as the most recent developments in our fields.

As such, this is not a matter of “that’s just your opinion,” and to suggest it is reveals a failure in critical thinking. Graduate educated instructors do not simply offer one more opinion just like anyone else’s. When speaking of their area of expertise, their opinion is generally based upon reasoned arguments and evidence to support it. While one may disagree with that considered opinion, simply dismissing it as just another opinion suggests avoidance out of a lack of ability to adequately respond. It also evidences a fundamental though common confusion of the right to form, hold and articulate opinions with an expectation that all such opinions must be equally respected and valued.

The other issue I hear at work here is a rather common conservative strategy of obfuscation and subterfuge engaged when one’s intellectual arsenal proves empty. One sees this process at work in conservative responses to evolution (“It’s just a theory. There are other theories that must be given equal time”) and climate change (“There are many scientists who disagree with global warming theory.”) The reality is that in both cases, the overwhelming majority of people who actually study these phenomena may be hard at work finding the various manifestations of these processes but they’re not wasting a lot of time debating their existence. Similarly, media’s talking heads who simply assert something is “controversial” are subtly signaling to their viewers “therefore, you should not take this seriously.” In all of these cases, it is little more than avoidance compounded by intellectual dishonesty.

The reality is that this instructor, like most who teach college classes, has spent a good bit of time reading, reflecting upon, discussing and testing the understandings he brings to the classroom. While that may prove daunting to students who hold other understandings and don’t wish to be responsible for them in class discussions, it’s really disingenuous to suggest that this somehow means the instructor prevents other ideas from seeing the light of day in class.

Indeed, it is a display of great respect for any given understanding when the instructor requires its offeror to explain and support it. It suggests that the instructor considers it valuable enough to use class time to seriously consider it. Moreover, it’s entirely possible that students could prompt their instructor – and their classmates - to think about a given idea in a new way. As I often say, I learn something new from my students every semester.


At the beginning of each semester in world religions, I tell my students that they do not have to believe anything to succeed in this class and they can ultimately believe anything they wish. But they do need to learn what the instructor they have chosen to help them learn about world religions determines to be essential for them to learn. That may draw some of their beliefs into question, indeed, it often does. But at the end of the term, there are no creeds recited, no pledges of allegiance, no loyalty oaths to any given understanding, only an exam which tests whether students understand the subject matter. If a student encounters cognitive dissonance in between those two points, all the better, for that is the teachable moment.

Why not simply meet the human being?

So, if students want to read my blog, welcome. I’m not sure what great revelations you will find here but welcome anyway. In all truthfulness, I thank G-d for blogs. They provide an opportunity for thoughtful, considered responses to what are generally cryptic and often pretty superficial postings on consumerist sites like ratemyprofessor.com (this posting to which I am responding here providing a welcome exception to that rule). I certainly have nothing to hide and you’d hear many of the same things from me in person if you actually come to my office to talk during office hours.

But what you might discover if you actually came for an office visit is an award winning instructor who truly loves teaching, who greatly cares for his students even as he persistently pushes them to achieve their potential. You might discover an instructor whose bookshelves in his office and at home bulge with the latest books and journal articles reflecting an intent to remain well-informed on the latest developments in his fields which immediately find light of day in class discussions.

You might also discover an instructor who spends hours of his own time each term advising hundreds of students on some of the most important aspects of their lives from graduate education to career choices to legal and spiritual questions. You might discover an instructor who goes out of his way to assist his students in everything from teaching independent study sections to help students graduate on time to writing some of the more persuasive reference letters one will ever receive. In short, you might actually discover a human being who is one of the more devoted educators you will encounter in your lifetime. All of that, of course, presuming you care enough to actually find out who this instructor really is rather than relying on the shallow, self-serving caricatures one finds on consumerist online sites.

One last comment. Given that some of you will actually read this blog entry at your classmate’s suggestion, let me suggest something to all of you. Rather than wasting your instructors’ time on these online sites with what are ultimately irrelevant considerations like your perceptions of their worldviews or your feelings about their person, why not give them something they actually need? Instructors are here for one purpose and one purpose only – to assist students in the process of becoming better educated human beings. The consumerist concerns many of you obsess over – work load, grades, whether you feel comfortable in class, et al – ultimately are beside the point when it comes to the process of education.


What we need to know, ultimately, is simply this: What did you learn? What do you understand differently now than when class began? How have you changed as a human being as a result of these new understandings? What will you do with what you have learned? Provide the answers to those questions and I assure you that you will have my complete attention every time. And I’d venture a guess that will be true for most of your instructors as well.

In the meantime, happy revelations seeking. And thanks to the student whose unusually balanced post provided an opportunity to give this response.


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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Very Revealing….” – I

A little context

Sometimes revelations can be inadvertent. But almost always, they prove enlightening. And inevitably they reveal as much about the revealer as that which they would endeavor to reveal.

Against my better judgment, I checked the Ratemyprofessor.com site again this week. While we in academia have come to realize we must endure this kind of mindless consumerism as an unavoidable part of our academic lives, one wonders what a consumer-driven site rating our students in a similar vein, say, Ratemystudents.com, might look like: “Lord, this was one lazy, whining bunch this term. And what are they teaching these kids in high school? I had to spend hours just correcting grammar and spelling.”

One also wonders what the university’s sell out to this consumer model, its now online Student Perception of Instruction, might look like with the shoe on the other foot: “I actually had three students who did not submit papers prepared for other classes or purchased from an online site for their final assignment this time. Where did they come from and are there any more like them out there?” No doubt, an Instructor Perception of Students site would prove just as lacking in objectivity and helpfulness to the students perceived as the current system confused with actual faculty evaluations provides their instructors.

While I promised myself I wouldn’t go back to the site, it’s like the inflamed mosquito bite that one can’t keep from picking at. So I stopped by to see if there were any more stink bombs lobbed my direction after the last wild-eyed venting of spleen. I was gratified to see only one new entry, this one rather temperate, much more mature than the usual self-focused complaining. It simply read:

This class was pretty demanding. I emerged with a respectable grade but I would caution students taking this class that there is a lot of work involved. For an honors class the amount of work is about what it should be, but a lot of writing is required and the professor is very liberal. Read his blog. It is revealing.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is famous for asserting that “A text without a context is a pretext.” So perhaps a little context might make this comment more intelligible.

At the end of each term, I engage in two forms of assessment designed to help me put student comments on evaluations into context. The first is an assessment of the workload I have assigned. Contrary to what students might think, I am very intentional in accounting for the time required to read materials, prepare assignments for class and study for exams. In the Honors World Religions class this term, this is the estimate of time required for its various aspects:

A. READING –

• Total Reading Required = 1001 pages

o College Level Reading Speed (1.5 min/page) = 25:02 hours
o High School Level Reading Speed (2 min/page) = 33:22 hours

B. ALL OTHER ASSIGNMENTS (writing and participation) – 43:30 hours total

C. TOTAL PREP TIME REQUIRED:

Slow readers – 78 hours
College level readers – 67.5 hours

D. TOTAL ACTUAL CLASS HOURS – 43

• Average Reasonably Expectable Prep Time (2 hours prep/1hour class) = 86 total hours/semester

The average reasonably expectable prep time (AREPT) for college students as demanded by virtually every college and university in North America and around much of the world is 2 hours prep time for every hour of class time. The World Religions course meets for 43 class hours each semester. That means that an average reasonably expectable prep time for this course is 86 hours. Note that even slow readers, at 78 hours total, were asked to prepare a full eight hours less than the average.

Clearly, this prep time estimate presumes that students are not simply occasionally looking down from the television, computer or text screen to actually engage the material. The notion of multitasking might stroke our egos with visions of our technological competence but in most cases it simply means trying to do a number of things in a mediocre fashion at best. Prep time means paying full attention to the task at hand.

In all fairness, to his or her credit, the student here recognizes the work load is hardly excessive for an honors class. Indeed, as noted above, it’s not even average for a college class generally. But that doesn’t mean students will not see a class with average demands to be excessive.

The second assessment I conduct at the end of each course is an anonymous survey in which students answer a number of questions about their expectations of college courses. The responses are, as the poster to Ratemyprofessor.com says, “very revealing.”

In all my classes, I ask students what grade they anticipated coming into the course. Of all the responses in the Honors World Religions section, not one suggested they should receive anything less than an A- though one did suggest they were uncertain what they expected. A full 77% of the class said they anticipated an A by the semester’s end with another 15% saying nothing less than an A- would do.

These results are only slightly higher than the results I get in classes outside the Honors College. But it speaks to the sense of entitlement many students have regarding grades generally as well as their tendency to underestimate the demands (often because they trivialize the necessity) of general education courses prior to taking them.

A second question asks students how they see the general requirement of two hours prep for every hour of class. Only 15% of the students saw this as actually less than they felt they needed, another 8% said it was about right in their experience with 77% reporting that average reasonably expectable prep time is “a nice goal but unrealistic given college life today.”

Finally, bear in mind that even for those who read at slower than college level reading speeds, the average of two hours outside of class for every class hour was ultimately not demanded in this course. Even so, when asked to rate this less than average prep time demand, only 8% said it was “about right,” another 62% reported the work load was “more than in other classes but not unreasonable,” while the remaining 30%, nearly 1/3 of this class of honors students, said this less than average prep time work load was “outrageous, students have lives outside of this class.”

I must commend the student poster to whom I am responding here who is apparently capable of distinguishing classes that demand much  from classes whose material and methods themselves are difficult. The reality is, this course is not particularly “hard,” as the rating service terms it.  It’s simply more demanding than many. And the work demanded is rewarded with a high side curve in grading. The student's time for the instructor's grade. Sounds like a fair deal to me.

So, is this course “very demanding” as the student poster suggested? It clearly is if one comes into the course expecting an A while unprepared to spend even average reasonably expectable prep time to obtain it. And yet it is possible to make an A in this class as 38% of this section did (and about 1 in 4 of all students in my classes do each term) while spending less than the average reasonably expectable prep time in that effort.

Ironically, it is the aspects about which students complain most that secure the As they expect. While this student complained about writing, more than half of the students in the class attained an A on the writing component of the course. That becomes very important when added to the exam component in which only 15% of the class averaged an A, this even with dropping the lower of their first two exam scores. Students raised on a diet of high stakes testing in high school and last minute cramming for lecture and high stakes testing in factory classes at the university tend to overestimate their test taking skills while simultaneously underestimating the material tested. Writing takes longer – including the participation assignments on which 31% of the class scored an A – but it also tends to have higher pay-offs both in terms of educational value as well as grades.

"I simply don't have the luxury of teaching..."

In all fairness, many students aren’t required to spend this time in other classes. There are a number of reasons for that. Factory-process auditorium classes at overcrowded universities don’t lend themselves to much other than lecture and multiple choice testing (with the cheating that comes along with that). Moreover, professors on tenure tracks pressured to publish-or-perish must place teaching as their second priority during their paper chase period. Those who don’t find themselves looking for other gigs. And, in a world where formerly prestigious state universities like the University of Virginia finds its state funding cut to 8% of its needed budget, the car washes and bake sales of grant procurement to keep the lights on (and the concomitant selling of one’s soul to the corporate entities and their agents in governmental departments that fund them) pushes teaching even further down the chain of priority. As the young tenure track professor sadly told me on the bus home one afternoon this past term, “I simply don’t have the luxury of teaching.”

Of course, there is also the reality that when consumer-student “perceptions of instruction” are actually taken seriously and used for purposes such as hiring, raises and promotions, it doesn’t take much street smarts to recognize that playing to the audience who holds up the score cards at the end of your dance routine is essential. The less the demands, the easier the grading, the more the egos are stroked in the classroom, the less one confronts poor thinking and writing, the closer one gets to a 10 even from the cynical Simon Cowells among one’s consumer-students.

And then there are those like this instructor who seek to preserve a modicum of academic rigor and integrity but find themselves increasingly weary of swimming upstream against the entropic tendencies of the increasingly technocratic consumerist world of academia. At what point does one simply give in, sell one’s soul and play the game to preserve one’s sanity if not one’s job?

A couple more comments to follow.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++