The Rigors of the Routine Life: Why I Might Be a Little Bit Homesick

A Friday cat blog, a day late...

I remember a sequence in the movie "The Truman Show" when the assembled cast was trying to convince Truman that he really didn't want to leave his home island; there were posters in the travel agency describing the horrors of terrorism or something, and there were no flights to Fiji for a month, the bus out of town broke down, and when he took a car, a nuclear power plant blew up and blocked the highway. Even as a child, he said he wanted to be an explorer, like the great Magellan. His teacher responded by saying "Oh, you're too late! There's nothing left to explore!"

There's a person I know. He was married for many years, decades actually, to a fine woman. They raised several sons, and he worked every day at a bank. He was a vice-president back in the day when in relatively small banks, vice-presidents were not quite the greedy captains of industry and finance that they are today. Every day he would commute by bus or train into the city, do his work, come home to a meal that was ready as he walked into the back door. There was television, or on Fridays, card games with the sons and their families, and that was the way it was for years. His wife worked every day to make sure his routine was not interrupted. They seemed, when I knew them, to be happy enough with their lives.

Sad events intervened. His wife became seriously ill, and after several hard months, passed away. By then he was retired, and now he was alone. What was to happen now? Disruptive events in life have many outcomes, some good, some not so good.  And some people surprise you. He loved his wife and never has forgotten her. But to say he broke out of a routine is an understatement. He was curious about the world, and decided to see more of it. He made trips to Europe and Russia. He traveled back to the towns he had grown up in during the Great Depression and World War II. He looked up friends and acquaintances from decades past (and he did it the hard way, by telephone book and road maps; Facebook wasn't invented yet!). In his nineties, he is certainly slowing down, but he found a richness in his new life that was quite different than what came before. I respect him in so many ways for that.

So this is a post about the rigors of the routine life. Routine gives our lives structure and stability. We work very hard sometimes to maintain it. We work, we eat, we sleep, we start over again, and there is a certain comfort, a big comfort really, in knowing what is coming next. I certainly have a particular routine in life. It was a different life from the person I spoke of above; I had chanced into a career that I loved, and it was career in which traveling and discovering the world was occasionally part of my job responsibility. I just had to be sure I was bringing students along with me! I'm just a few days away from leaving on a long journey through the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rocky Mountains and I am looking forward to it in so many ways.

But a funny thing happened earlier this year. Actually not a funny thing at all, not in that sense. We've always had to struggle with tight budgets at my college; it's a fact of life that we must not waste taxpayers money, and yet offer the best possible education to our students that we can. But this year was different: the cuts were far deeper and whole programs were terminated. No one knew whose programs were on the chopping block, and it is an ugly feeling knowing that one could possibly lose a job after decades. And too many of my colleagues did lose their jobs. It's a story familiar to untold millions in our country during this depression (and that is what it is; the bankers may have their trillions, satisfying the economists that things are better, but I am surrounded by unemployed friends and foreclosed homes). It has been a scary year.

So I've been puttering about the yard this week, getting things weeded and trimmed so we can leave it for a couple of weeks. And I noticed a lot of beauty and color in the yard that had become so familiar over the years. We hardly landscaped this year; all the flowers that popped up were winter survivors or seedlings left over from last year. But they sprouted, and the porch is kind of a nice place right now in the early evening. And even before we've left on our journey, I realize I am going to miss my home a bit. We came uncomfortably close to losing it, and there is no certainty that the horrific situation at work won't be repeated next year.

And of course I always miss my sweet (really!) cat, and wonderful dog.

So tonight is a paean to the home life and routine and appreciating the blessings of the little things, like flowers in the yard that survive my disastrous efforts at home-based agriculture. Later this week comes a brand new journey to new places and high adventure. And there are wonderful things about both. Routine can be a bad thing, a limiting thing, but it can be a source of comfort as well. We just should just avoid being trapped in it.

So, quoting our good friend Truman, "Good morning, and in case I don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!" Blogging may be a bit light or non-existent while we are on the road, but you can be sure that there will be many stories to be told in a few weeks when we return.

By the way, happy Easter. The Easter lilies by the air conditioner bloomed today, so it's Easter, right?

A CEO, a Tea Partier and a Union Member...

It's the "joke" that's making the rounds today:

"A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.'"

It's been a hard day, a hard week, a hard couple of years. I'm finding I may have to say goodbye to a number of people with whom I've worked for years. For all I know, my own job was on the chopping block; many others at our school didn't think this would happen to them, and yet it did. We are lopping off entire programs: engineering, architecture, mass media and others. Deep cuts in others. The math is frightening; the state doesn't take in enough to pay for the education it is committed to provide. So the cuts come.

We can take steps; there is talk of offering a voluntary pay cut to save jobs and programs. There are other alternatives being suggested. But all of them represent a retreat from education.

I don't blame our local administrators; they've been dealt the cards they have. Many of them are new at their jobs, having been hired only in the last year or two. We will see how they deal with these hard issues. Today's cuts are the opening move and much is to be negotiated.

I do blame the politicians. I think that the people of our state might be willing to sacrifice a little longer to maintain the education of their children, their spouses, their parents. But there is a group, a political party, that is resisting letting the population even vote to continue a bit longer the taxes and fees that were instituted in the last year or two and are expiring. They should get out of the way and at least let us try to convince the population that education is worth saving.

And there is the bigger issue, the subject of the joke of the day. There is a yawning economic chasm between the rich and the rest of our society. More wealth is concentrated with the highest two percent of the population than at any time in the last century. And no one seems to ask, or even suggest that they could help in this time of dire need, by paying taxes at a rate equal to what they paid only a decade ago, before the Bush tax cuts and others decimated federal and state budgets. Instead we argue among ourselves over the crumbs.

The economists tell us the recession is over. But all I see happening around my community is more store closings, more employees being laid off, more houses being foreclosed. We are living in a depression, and I don't see the end of it. Maybe there is some economist who can explain to me how things are better right now.

A message to the ultra-rich: laid-off workers don't buy your products, invest in your hedge funds, or buy houses. Neither do people who are still working but are worried for their jobs and seeing their salaries cut. I paint with broad brush strokes and I know that there are many well-off people who understand this basic economic truth, but there are obviously many who don't. This society allowed you to become rich; to paraphrase the Bible, from those who are given much, much is expected. It's time for everyone in our society to step up to the plate and work together to get out of this horrific economic mess.

Education made this country and my state great. I knew many of the "greatest generation" who came home from the second world war, got an education, and proceeded to build the greatest economy ever seen on this planet. They went to the moon and the planets, they invented computers that transformed society, they built a society that took care of the aged, the sick, and disabled. They made unbelievable advances in medicine. They built the best cars and transportation systems in the world. I saw these things happen in my lifetime. Our children have that potential, if we can only guide them and inspire them.

But instead we are now in retreat; education is devalued and teachers and professors are demonized by politicians. We are made to do more, far more, with less. I despair and grieve at what our society has come to. We have huge challenges ahead as a society; the end of the oil economy, global climate change, resource depletion, water shortages, food production disruptions and many others in the earth sciences alone. Every other academic field can point to other big problems. And our response is to cut the pool of talented individuals by making education inaccessible to more and more members of our society.

What Does Education Look Like?

What in the world could cause students to be taking pictures of murky brown water??

I am leaving tomorrow on our yearly field studies journey to Death Valley National Park. It is one of the centerpieces of our earth science/geology program at our community college, and has been a yearly tradition since I started at the school in 1988. Hundreds of students have attended and participated; many have gone on to become geology majors and teachers, and many point to their experience in the field as the defining point in their lives.

Geology is the most field oriented of the natural sciences. One could be educated about the facts of the earth in a classroom, one can look at all the latest innovative media resources about the earth, and one can become proficient at the science. But classroom learning is nothing like standing on the outcrop, and seeing the rocks, seeing the actual structure of the earth. To be a student standing in front of an angular unconformity or a fault line in an outcrop, with all the vegetation and debris obscuring the actual relationships, is to be a James Hutton, a Charles Lyell, or a Nicolas Steno on the threshold of significant insight. It is the exhilaration of discovery, a deeper understanding growing out of putting the pieces together by yourself. It is the exploration of mysterious places, a voyage into terra incognita.

I don't think I can overstate the value of field experiences in an earth science/geology education. But I don't know what is coming next. The depression (and despite what the economists say, this is a depression) is ripping out the heart of education in our state and across the country. In the midst of economic chaos, the need for an educated population is the greatest it has ever been, and our resources are shrinking. Where do we go from here? For now, I'm going to do what I can, and what is possible. I'm going to take an enthusiastic group of students into the wilds, and we will experience together the thrill of discovery. And I'm going to hope for the future.