I'd like to say that I was busy saving the world, but the truth is that I was just busy.
I seem to be in the habit of going on especially long hiatuses recently. I certainly don’t intend that to be the case. I’ve always found that writing down my thoughts and publishing them in some context or other has been profoundly useful to me in straightening out the things that I think and ironing out the wrinkles in the way that I understand the world to be. Nothing can quite show you the truly horrific gaps in your reasoning or fallacious conclusions quite like having to critically examine them as you write them down. It is a simultaneously humbling experience to see your own thoughts laid so plainly in front of you and a powerfully uplifting experience to see at once how to improve your own arguments and think more coherently.
I’ve dozens of topics about which I have been meaning to write. The refusal of New York City officials to allow the Iranian President to lay a wreath at ‘Ground Zero’ for the victims who died when the towers collapsed on 9/11 galled me, especially since the predominant reason seemed to be a nebulous form of racism or religious discrimination. Iran has never been shown to have been involved in the devastation wrought that day, but the publicized opinion of New Yorkers seemed to be ‘He [the Iranian President] should be ashamed to even ask such a thing. He should go to hell.’ After all, he’s a brown person, right? And a Muslim to boot. “They” must all be guilty, right?
I meant to write about how the Iranian President was received when he came to speak at a university. Imagine such an honor! The visiting President of a foreign nation deigning to speak to a crowd of at a college? It’s fantastic. That kind of thing is a fabulous opportunity for students to meet and learn about a man who will shape the foreign policy of a whole region of the world – and who might influence the foreign policy of our own country as well. Instead of simply allowing the Iranian President to speak freely of his ideas and letting the students decide for themselves how totally screwed up (or not) he is (and he is very screwed up, let me assure you), his introduction to the assembled auditorium was filled with vitriol calling him a petty dictator and asserting that most of the visiting dignitary’s ideas were false. While it is true that many of his ideas are false, simply asserting so in such a manner runs flatly counter to the entire educational enterprise and should have been condemned for what it was: a cheap ploy to pander to the same popular anti-Muslim/racist sentiment that motivated the New Yorker’s response to the same man. (Git ‘im! He’s a brown feller what worships a demon desert-god!). If the University had desired to have their students learn from the episode instead of treating the event as a publicity stunt designed to hold a foreign Executive up for ridicule (fat chance of having other foreign leaders address our Universities now…), the University could have easily arranged for a second presentation afterwards in which historians presented the powerful and overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust most certainly did occur, or where sociologists presented the evidence which would show that Iranians are not immune from being born as homosexuals (one of the Iranian President’s more silly claims).
I’ve wanted to write about my battles with the state bureaucracy here in Washington, in which official after official gives me differing and sometimes contradictory answers to identical questions, and in which state and county agencies seem to make quite serious errors without any noticeable effort on their parts to discover the sources of those errors or remedy them in a timely fashion. For instance, I registered to vote in Washington by mailing in a form to the Secretary of State’s office. After waiting a month without receiving my voter’s registration card, I called up my local elections office who notified me that I was indeed registered to vote, but that for some unknown reason, they had simply failed to mail me a registration card. When I asked for one to be mailed, they informed me that because the primaries were starting, they’d be too busy to mail me the registration card - documentation that I needed for another government service. After the primary was completed (a month later), they said they would mail me the card they had initially forgotten to send, but that card didn’t arrive in my mailbox until a full two-weeks after they said it had been mailed to me. I know mail can sometimes be slow, but given that the elections office from which it was mailed is located within ten miles of me, I’m fairly sure that two weeks is an unreasonably long time to wait. I could have walked it to my mailbox in a minute fraction of that time…
Anyway, there have been many developments about which I have wanted to write, exploring my thoughts and feelings about them in some depth, but over the past month, I have consistently failed to ever sit down and attempt to write down my thoughts. Every time I attempted to do so, I found myself distracted.
Here’s to hoping that I can manage to set aside my attention-span issue for a moment and get back to work.
I’ve dozens of topics about which I have been meaning to write. The refusal of New York City officials to allow the Iranian President to lay a wreath at ‘Ground Zero’ for the victims who died when the towers collapsed on 9/11 galled me, especially since the predominant reason seemed to be a nebulous form of racism or religious discrimination. Iran has never been shown to have been involved in the devastation wrought that day, but the publicized opinion of New Yorkers seemed to be ‘He [the Iranian President] should be ashamed to even ask such a thing. He should go to hell.’ After all, he’s a brown person, right? And a Muslim to boot. “They” must all be guilty, right?
I meant to write about how the Iranian President was received when he came to speak at a university. Imagine such an honor! The visiting President of a foreign nation deigning to speak to a crowd of at a college? It’s fantastic. That kind of thing is a fabulous opportunity for students to meet and learn about a man who will shape the foreign policy of a whole region of the world – and who might influence the foreign policy of our own country as well. Instead of simply allowing the Iranian President to speak freely of his ideas and letting the students decide for themselves how totally screwed up (or not) he is (and he is very screwed up, let me assure you), his introduction to the assembled auditorium was filled with vitriol calling him a petty dictator and asserting that most of the visiting dignitary’s ideas were false. While it is true that many of his ideas are false, simply asserting so in such a manner runs flatly counter to the entire educational enterprise and should have been condemned for what it was: a cheap ploy to pander to the same popular anti-Muslim/racist sentiment that motivated the New Yorker’s response to the same man. (Git ‘im! He’s a brown feller what worships a demon desert-god!). If the University had desired to have their students learn from the episode instead of treating the event as a publicity stunt designed to hold a foreign Executive up for ridicule (fat chance of having other foreign leaders address our Universities now…), the University could have easily arranged for a second presentation afterwards in which historians presented the powerful and overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust most certainly did occur, or where sociologists presented the evidence which would show that Iranians are not immune from being born as homosexuals (one of the Iranian President’s more silly claims).
I’ve wanted to write about my battles with the state bureaucracy here in Washington, in which official after official gives me differing and sometimes contradictory answers to identical questions, and in which state and county agencies seem to make quite serious errors without any noticeable effort on their parts to discover the sources of those errors or remedy them in a timely fashion. For instance, I registered to vote in Washington by mailing in a form to the Secretary of State’s office. After waiting a month without receiving my voter’s registration card, I called up my local elections office who notified me that I was indeed registered to vote, but that for some unknown reason, they had simply failed to mail me a registration card. When I asked for one to be mailed, they informed me that because the primaries were starting, they’d be too busy to mail me the registration card - documentation that I needed for another government service. After the primary was completed (a month later), they said they would mail me the card they had initially forgotten to send, but that card didn’t arrive in my mailbox until a full two-weeks after they said it had been mailed to me. I know mail can sometimes be slow, but given that the elections office from which it was mailed is located within ten miles of me, I’m fairly sure that two weeks is an unreasonably long time to wait. I could have walked it to my mailbox in a minute fraction of that time…
Anyway, there have been many developments about which I have wanted to write, exploring my thoughts and feelings about them in some depth, but over the past month, I have consistently failed to ever sit down and attempt to write down my thoughts. Every time I attempted to do so, I found myself distracted.
Here’s to hoping that I can manage to set aside my attention-span issue for a moment and get back to work.
posted by The Academian | 11:46 PM
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