How The Rest of the World Thinks...

I learned a long time ago that the state of the world--and where we live--is often described in terms of the little things that people say or do not say and the icons that we hold dear. The inductive method lends itself to this type of observation and it begins with the individual. Of course, most newspapers use this method to prove almost anything…. So, while it is a worthwhile tool, the observer must exercise care in choosing his subjects for study.



Do they represent the larger body? And what makes them suitable test subjects are legitimate questions; nevertheless, they also open further avenues for investigation.



My thesis is predicated on my conversations with several people on a recent visit to southwest Florida; some of these people I’ve known over a quarter century; my second source is completely new to me.



Let me digress for a moment, annually I meet with a group of people drawn mainly from the mid-west, people I have known for many years and with whom I have a relationship of trust.



It is an odd pairing; I am a secular humanist—something they don’t understand; and they are mainly Evangelical.



These are educated people so their opinions are for the most part informed.



The one family I am thinking most specifically about is made up of laymen and ministers.



They are all lovely people who do good works without bravado or advertising the fact.



Probably the most difficult subject we talk about is politics. They tend to look upon the leadership of the country as being the president; not the individual who is the president.

Consequently, that tends to elevate the person who holds the president as being an extraordinary human being. Consistent with this notion is that a president could never mislead his flock or lie.

It is to my mind a kind of childish notion of belief that somehow is reassuring to those who consider themselves part of the flock i.e. the president would never do anything that is inconsistent with the betterment of those who believe. The key here seems to be holding the same things in common. As long as they believe that they have the same values, anyone holding the presidency can virtually do no wrong.



And this is the core of the problem and the reason why the president holds onto a base come hell or high water.



It has little to do with what he or she does; it has to do with what he is perceived to represent; that is my primary observation.



The second part of my thesis has to do with the intellectual well from which we draw.



Again. I employ randomness and observation to gather ideas about what the rest of the world sees and understand. Since again I am employing Induction to formulate my insights, I could be either off by a mile or a microsecond…. Nevertheless, in choosing subjects I tend to lean towards subjects that seem to represent the general case.



Using these simple lessons of observations, I never cease to be amazed at some of the stuff one learns on such a voyage of discovery.



On a recent trip to southwest Florida where I have a wealth of historical and personal memories from vacations and business trips over more than twenty five years, I found myself visiting a new library and a local bookstore owned by the library.





I begin this journey with certain knowledge; that the area is conservative and heavily oriented towards retirees from the mid-west which makes provides a fairly uniform platform for research and observation.



Getting back to my research, during the course of my investigation of this resource, I found myself in conversation with the manager, a man who had spent his life as a high school principal. On entering the store, he had asked me if he could help me find what I was looking for and inasmuch as the bookstore was overflowing with books laid out in a pattern I hadn’t quite discerned as yet, I told him I was looking to find a Vonnegut book that I had somehow missed.



We were both peers and I was surprised to hear him ask, "Vonn.....?" as if he had never heard the name. And after stumbling the second and third time, I rushed to his aid and pronounced the name again. I didn’t want to embarrass the man by describing his influence on those who graduated after the second world war.



He clearly never heard the name before.



This coming from a nice man responsible for the education of high school class after high school class who passed through the doors of his school, a man who clearly never heard of one of the most important post WWII writers!....



I couldn’t help but wonder how could an educator arrive at old age so poorly prepared unless his notion of education was far different from my own.



It was enough to make one wonder what has happened to education in the US?



THe bigger question to me was how could an educator who obviously quite impressed with his own academic credentials, a man of my own generation, not know of Kurt Vonnegut. I wondered what else this man who had shaped young minds also not know.



If an educator doesn’t know Vonnegut, how could he know what happened during the Beat Generation or the Protest Generation which defined much of the period through Vietnam. . I was sure he never heard of Kerouac or the broader intellectuals like Vidal or even people like Lippmann or Lerner. Who gave meaning to the post-war period right through Vietnam.. Did he know of the writers who wrote about that generation…. Could this man possibly know anything of the real world he inhabited? Did he know about the hawks who talked of falling dominoes, the Evans and Novaks and the rest of the war-mongering crowd who thought that the only way to save America was to spill American blood?. Men who failed to understand that all the Vietnamese leadership wanted to do was get rid of the Colonial powers and remove the yoke of foreign oppression…..How could he understand what was going on, in the same way he couldn’t understand how Vonnegut was condemning all war…



But by the very same definition, we were entrusting men and women like him to shape the way our young people thought. How could his generation of faux educators have possibly prepared young minds to deal with the aftermath of a war that caused us to lose over 50,000 young men and women. A generation that came home misunderstood and challenged by a world unprepared to welcome them back or appreciate them for their sacrifices.



It cleared my mind a little to consider that this man had probably never traveled away from his home town and never questioned things on his own and perhaps because of him and his peers, we returning Americans felt so isolated and rejected from the rest of America.



I thought about these things as I continued my conversation with this man who managed to grow into his senior years clearly detached from anything that conflicted with his preprogrammed thinking and I thought how unfair it was for his charges not to know what this man, an educator, could not deliver. And maybe that’s why we are paying such a price for isolation right now in a world that we barely seem to understand. It is my thesis and I don’t know if it will hold up to scrutiny but I think it is a good starting point.



Les Aaron..