We are broken...

I'm feeling broken...anybody else?

This semester, I am teaching a course on Comparative and International Education (it’s what my doctorate is in, but I don’t get to teach it often). Yesterday, the Monday after people gathered to support and celebrate the toxicity that is known as “American” Football, the Monday after another vicious attack was made on the Palestinian people in Rafah while “Americans” were (probably) cheering for an inappropriately named team, I couldn’t function. Clearly, I am not a fan of “American” football - for numerous reasons including but not limited to it exemplifying militarism, materialism, commercialism, competition, and toxic masculinity (ever check out the stats on domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday?). But this year, it just felt extra icky.

I am usually a champion at compartmentalizing having needed to do so for various reasons for more than 40 years now. But yesterday, I couldn’t do it. I left the house and drove to campus in a daze and when the time came for us to do our standard one-word check-in (a practice I do to open every class meeting to see how we are all feeling before we dig into the topic of the day), I could only say one word: broken. I then proceeded to cry in front of my students at the atrocities of this world, at how our tax dollars fund the death of children, and how people would rather get wrapped up in the love affair of Travis and Taylor and the ability of hyper-masculine dudes to move a ball down a field (while getting paid millions of dollars) than focus on the bombing of a place where 1.4 million refugees have been forced to shelter. I apologized for crying and sharing my sadness and feelings. I thanked them for letting me be vulnerable with them. And then I said, can we sit in silence for a few minutes or does anyone else want to share? 

And it happened. Student after student - five or so - shared their sadness and feelings of frustration, helplessness, and guilt. They shared that they were horrified that atrocities in Palestine and Sudan were seen as less important than sports, celebrities, and media-created distractions. One student shared her incredulity that we don’t learn from the past, that we are now watching history - history of horrors - repeat itself. I was reminded of Albert Memmi’s work, “The Colonizer and the Colonized” and how those who have been subjected to horrors (via oppression or colonization or genocide) re-enact those horrors on others once they have the chance.

One student shared her feelings of guilt about having joy and excitement over a good thing in her life when whole populations are being eradicated. She said, “It just feels like we can’t do anything” to make things change. Lots of heads nodded in agreement. There were real feelings of overwhelm and powerlessness and palpable frustration. We talked about Social Media—which I had taken a break from and may need to do again (yes, a privilege, to be sure)—and the culture of distraction. As we shared, the Rage Against the Machine lyric,  “Come and play, forget about the movement”, kept popping into my head. We have so successfully inculcated people into our cult of militarism, materialism, and distraction, and we spend so much time on social media platforms ‘selling ourselves’ and buying into rampant consumerism, that we don’t even realize that we are being deliberately and strategically ‘amused’ to keep us from seeing true suffering and imagining that another world is possible.

We ended this discussion with some silence and a commitment to support one another as we tried to be voices of resistance and reason in an unreasonable world. As we shifted into our discussion examining education reform practices in the US, Japan, Singapore, China, and Finland, I realized—and shared with them—that we might need to do more readings about the lingering effects of colonialism and neo-colonialism on education systems around the world. So, we’re adjusting the syllabus in the hopes that we can better understand how the Root Cause of colonialism continues to wreak havoc today. 

For months now, I have been sending emails and texts, signing onto letters written by other clergy and academics….and will continue to do so. I still feel broken, but I am so grateful for the young people I spend my days with. They get it too. And maybe through (and with) them, we can live a more humane and just world into being.