"The Art of Making Possible" [Nancy Scheibner]

Man! Dude! Session #336

(D)ude: Man! Has all media in the United States descended into a culture of obscenities?

(M)an: Dude! Wikipedia defines an obscenity as “any statement or act that strongly offends the prevalent morality of the time” but I think media in the United States has descended into that culture of obscenities you mention via statements and acts that strongly offend the prevalent civil rights legislation and laws of all time, particularly

voting rights as specified in the Fourteenth Amendment and equal protection guarantees in the Fifteenth Amendment.

D: Man! MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spoke by phone on-air Monday, April 27th, with Baltimore City’s Branch President of the NAACP Tessa Hill-Aston and she said it best regarding money in politics, stating that money was not the foremost issue, rather the lives of our African American sons (and daughters if this crisis is not redressed) are in danger 24/7 because the color of their skin brings them in the firing lines of berating police officers and law enforcement officials for whom deadly force is no longer a last resort but a justifiable means for intervention when confronting fleeing African American suspects. 

M: Dude! Our African American sons (and daughters too) [as well as our Hispanic American and disadvantaged White American sons (and daughters too)] are shot or maimed to death before their Miranda Rights are read to them by police officers. When one is Mirandized, the wording goes as follows, according to mirandawarning dot gov,

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me?

D: Man! S. E. Hinton wrote 1967’s The Outsiders while still a teenager. I remember reading about her as the sixteen-year-old prodigy in all the young adult magazines when Francis Ford Coppola was still being celebrated and followed around as the director of the era in Hollywood throughout the eighties. Coppola’s film adaptations of Hinton’s The Outsiders and Rumble Fish came out in 1983 and have maintained relevance for generations of children and adolescents. S. E. Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola remained powerhouse collaborating geniuses well into the late nineties.        

M: Dude! It took well over a decade to get S. E. Hinton’s works adapted. Remember, Hinton is less than a year away in age from Hillary Rodham Clinton. Interestingly, both women come from the generation that championed equal rights in every way. Hinton focused on the sun rising and setting the same for every human being regardless of socioeconomic status and subsequent manmade constructs and consequences, like which side of the railroad tracks one lived determining their chances of surviving high school let alone the cops, the “greasers” being the impoverished gang of societal misfits and the “socs” being the affluent gang of ill-reputes only amongst peers. Hillary Rodham Clinton, chosen by her 1969 Wellesley College graduating class to deliver the commencement address, had been a critical figure in keeping the women’s college from sundering to chaos like many American colleges and universities had after the April 4th, 1968 assassination of MLK, Jr.; as a fearless public speaker herself, serving as an unbiased student government president actively advocating for improved race relations on campus, HRC’s brilliance as the restless and spontaneous political participant would lead her to add onto her prepared remarks, as archived at wellesley dot edu,

Hillary D. Rodham's 1969 Student Commencement Speech

Ruth M. Adams, ninth president of Wellesley College, introduced Hillary D. Rodham '69, at the 91st commencement exercises.

Introduction

In addition to inviting Senator Brooke to speak to them this morning, the Class of '69 has expressed a desire [for a student] to speak to them and for them at this morning's commencement. There was no debate so far as I could ascertain as to who their spokesman was to be: Miss Hillary Rodham. Member of this graduating class, she is a major in political science and a candidate for the degree with honors. In four years she has combined academic ability with active service to the College, her junior year having served as a Vil Junior, and then as a member of Senate and during the past year as president of College Government and presiding officer of College Senate. She is also cheerful, good humored, good company, and a good friend to all of us and it is a great pleasure to present to this audience Miss Hillary Rodham.

             

Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham

I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us—the 400 of us—and I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give.

Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3 percent of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective.

D: Man! HRC’s middle name is Diane, hence, Hillary Diane Rodham at the time of her undergrad commencement. Remember that she met Bill Clinton later at Yale Law School. As far as the comments during the preceding commencement address by Senator Edward W. Brooke, I’m reading his speech as we speak and finding the line at the start about Wellesley having quote unquote even more admirers than its girls have beaux, and I am pleased to be among this college’s most enthusiastic boosters, very offensive indeed. Nevertheless, Senator Brooke took twenty-one-year-old Hillary Rodham’s reply so seriously and with such sincerity as to redefine his policy trajectory in the 1970s. Brooke had fought for civil rights and co-wrote the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which led to the formation of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s [HUD] Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. But upon his return to the United States Senate after the fateful exchange of perspectives with such an incredibly spontaneous and thorough response by Hillary Rodham, Senator Brooke would take into account women’s rights in passing legislation and confirming judgeships.       

The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot. Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade—years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program—so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: "Why, if you're dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?" Well, if you didn't care a lot about it you wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother used to say, "I'll always love you but there are times when I certainly won't like you." Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education.

D: Man! Get this! Senator Brooke was elected as a Republican from Massachusetts into the United States Senate in 1966 and it wasn’t until 1993 that the United States elected its second African American Senator, Democrat Carol Moseley Braun from Illinois, part of HRC’s generational cohort. There’s a really great photograph via Wikipedia from 1993 of the five female United States Senators then from the Democratic Party—Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski, Washington’s Patty Murray, California’s Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and Illinois’s Moseley Braun.     

Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder's parking lot. We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirement. We worked for a pass-fail system. We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision making. And luckily we were in a place where, when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning. So we have made progress. We have achieved some of the things that initially [we] saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality. Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know. We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here. We questioned about what responsibility we should have both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group.

D: Man! Senator Brook references the wisdom of the genius social commentator and cartoonist Al Capp. According to Capp’s brother, the satirist had independently and completely read the entire works of William Shakespeare by the age of 13 despite never having completed high school due to failing geometry for nine consecutive semesters. Al Capp’s father had encouraged and suggested drawing cartoons to him after Al lost his leg in an accident during boyhood and withdrew into depression. Had Al Capp not been encouraged and engaged back into life with the will to live by an active parent as his father, his trajectory was otherwise plummeting because of the barrage of technicalities that kept him in high school for five years because of failing one course over and over again. Get this! Al Capp’s failure to pay tuition on time at art school during young adulthood got him expelled from the top institutions over and over again.         

Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We were lucky in that one of the first things Miss Adams did was to set up a cross-registration with MIT because everyone knows that education just can't have any parochial bounds any more. One of the other things that we did was the Upward Bound program. There are so many other things that we could talk about; so many attempts, at least the way we saw it, to pull ourselves into the world outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will be an Upward Bound program, just for one example, on the campus this summer.

D: Man! There is an answer for the blasé that surfaces in children and teenagers either periodically or consistently in grade school and high school. The solution involves a fresher perspective on individual personality and human attention span. In the age of succinct TED Talks that do not exceed 18 minutes in length, and around-the-clock  Starbucks Speech and Debate Forums embracing all socioeconomic backgrounds being proposed for implementation inside all such coffeehouses by CEO Howard Schultz, our school curricula need to evolve and adapt to the speed of Internet and 21st century technologies. There are short-term achievements and then there are long-term achievements in educational attainment processes we enroll our children into for just about the entire span of their childhood and adolescence. Grades are just not representative enough in the Information Age. Our kids need to be able to create a curriculum vitae as soon as whenever they learn how to create complete sentences with their nascent vocabularies in the first grade. And these CVs should be printed at the end of the year in the memory books alongside every child’s school photograph, instead of requiring youth to come up with a story or poem of juvenile conjuring.          

Many of the issues that I've mentioned—those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility—have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multimedia age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling.

D: Man! The long-term achievement praxis of receiving one numerical grade per 6 week interval can lead to academic apathy as a result of the anxiety of not being able to show something imaginative and challenging for all the time spent at elementary school besides the cotton ball bearded Santa at the start and the decoupage coaster in the end. I wish I had a collection of my CVs from elementary and middle schools. I’m not instructing teachers to demand professorial quality work, but annual developmental strides alongside the academic shortfalls. The CVs will highlight the individual child’s cultural-historical context, as researched and elucidated in the works of pioneer theorist Lev Vygotsky.         

We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words—integrity, trust, and respect—in regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.

D: Man! School-age children are not unsophisticated and there ought to be annual courses on Growth and Reproductive Health throughout elementary and middle school, which include instructing children how to respond to changes and circumstances like a parent divorcing and remarrying or dying, and what constitutes harassment and abuse or rape. Police officers and firefighters mustn’t only instruct in first aid and fire safety, but assist in training teachers on how to discuss street violence and the code of friendship that oftentimes lends to a child or teen’s becoming ensconced in the social world of incarceration through the gang they’re relying on as family members because of a lack of presence of legitimate caregivers and providers. Plus, our children need to be reading sex education literature from the time they begin to question their guardians. This is the perfect time for a child to begin traversing the library shelves alongside guardians or mentors or librarians for classics in the field by Valorie Schaefer and Norm Bendell, Kelli Dunham and Steve Bjorkman, Marshall B. Rosenberg and Arun Gandhi, and Heather Corinna. Growing up, I always tended to migrate towards grownup books that my older siblings and parents had set aside. Whether or not they had completely read the books beforehand did not occur to my egocentrism. Censorship was not taboo in my home or yours, and we turned out rather sober, didn’t we?           

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper or Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive—now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see—but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.

D: Man! Our schoolchildren need to be informed beyond the point of being vaguely aware of Miranda Rights and human rights. They need to have been thoroughly educated before the age of 11-years-old regarding healthy boundaries and being comfortable with 21st century skills sets that include conversational patience and goodwill and actively listening to a cross-section of peers  at school as prescribed by the person-centered approach’s creator, hence first practitioner, Carl Rogers in his 1961 groundbreaking memoir and guidebook On Becoming a Person. For our children to grow up as empathic beings, educators and academics must become sensitive to the blooming diversity in societies and schools and the potential to open doors for all our children’s self-esteem and confidence levels to rise up instead of declining into self-doubt and timidity by the time they’re abruptly given the task to transition out of high school, preferably with a diploma and a resume well worth their time. Al Capp visited children’s hospitals and encouraged hospitalized veterans as well, having triumphed over “disability” and sadness himself, with his wit and concern, not wince and pity.                

But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity—a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in "East Coker" by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

D: Man! The mega successful posthumous career of the prolific amateur photographer Vivian Maier, who retired in impoverishment and died alone and mentally ill despite her network of well-off acquaintances for whom she had served as a professional nanny for so many years, is a horrific reminder of the injustices of our beloved America’s manufactured poverty and propagandist prejudices—residuals of corporate nontransparent mob rule and the resulting reign of terror due to trickle down economics and our very own kangaroo court’s Citizens United ruling—that have plagued us in previous centuries and in, around, and during President George Walker Bush’s Administration at the start of this millennium and even today with the “free and adversarial” press that the White House Correspondents Association’s Board President Christi Parsons, vis a vis Sheldon Adelson and David Koch et al, trajected sneeringly and Cecily Strong, vis a vis Lorne Michaels et al, shouldered hoarsely at this year’s WHC Dinner. When last year’s documentary about Vivian Maier’s life did not receive the 2015 Oscar and the award went, instead, to a docu concerning the foolishly celebrated degenerate Edward Snowden, it was obvious that 2010’s Tea Party GOP and 2014’s Teabag Democrats had surfaced once again in another needless obscene contextualism by Hollywood’s uppity vulgarians fraternizing too with the Adelsons and Kochs like the United States Press Corps.           

And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word consequences of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to a woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

D: Man! Bollywood’s succumbing to needless obscene contextualism by the BJP’s  uppity vulgarians fraternizing too with the Tea Party Republicans and Teabag Democrats who have been orchestrating an overall anarchic nosedive for our beloved democracies by way of cultural vulgarities on cable and network television beginning while immobilizing voters in 2010 and frustrating voters in 2014. Look how the American entertainment and news industries excised perceptive men of unmatched good taste Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, David Gregory, David Letterman, and Brian Williams; replacing these men of elegant spontaneity with obscenely obsolete vulgarians unable to perform without a script, becoming angry as a result of their own predilection for the stale and rot like Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Seth Myers, and Chuck Todd. The goal of these Adel-sons and Koch-heads and Lorne-lings is to make society so immune to the partisan and subversively lewd subliminal racism, sexism, and ageism that the political leaders and corporations can finance genocidal policies throughout the world. That is the root of corruption. The status quo spreads and solidifies corruption by wars. The solution is always diplomacy because that is the only means to achieving advanced evolutionary growth for every member of humankind. War is only meaningful if you’re in any way a doctrinaire. As societies, India and US have to surpass caste and class. In the age of globalization, why cannot all our Charleses and Charlottes born everywhere today have their families’ blessings regardless of the nation, race, sex, gender, caste, and class of their partners or better halves?          

There are two people that I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing that I would like to read:

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"

Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.

The hollow men of anger and bitterness

The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation

All must be left to a bygone age.

And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle

For all those myths and oddments

Which oddly we have acquired

And from which we would become unburdened

To create a newer world

To transform the future into the present.

We have no need of false revolutions

In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds

And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.

It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.

And once those limits are understood

To understand that limitations no longer exist.

Earth could be fair. And you and I must be free

Not to save the world in a glorious crusade

Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain

But to practice with all the skill of our being

The art of making possible.