a long rest.

Three weeks left. You can taste it, too? To feel like we are nearing the end? The fetishization of a future outcome that is about as real as a daydream. Looking out the window and see yourself far from here. A third-person view of yourself, smiling. You've never seen yourself so happy before. It scares you a little bit. To spend all that extra energy on a delusion. Just to be disappointed.

Academia and education sits at a unique spot in my heart. In my undergrad, academia appeared to me as a higher echelon of thinking and being. I found that, as much as doubted myself, it was something that I could do. Think deeply in weird ways to come to a solution that might be more beneficial than what was there before. It could have been like reaching the golden gates, where St. Peter would greet me like an old friend, and could spend the rest of infinity with the largest community possible. Then, like a child finding out the magical and powerful Santa Claus is only as real as a historical local and a exploitative marketing scheme, the magic is sucked out and left only the numbers and facts.

In Pedagogy, we talked about CAPS, Critical Activism Pedagogy, where the class designed is asking students through what they read, learn, engage with, and open-up to each other about, is all a part of a culmination of calling to arm action both inside but especially outside the classroom. More than simply asking how we should be in the world, CAPs proposes how we ought to be and how to do it. It's a novel idea. But the cynicism that has always lurked mind takes over, and I can't help but point towards the hypocrisy in front of me while ignoring the hypocrisy coming from inside.

In my jaded heart, what to me is supposed to be a beacon of enlightenment, is marred by personal conceits that are unable to live up to the image of their own research. Pretentious, narcissistic, and elitist, the academic stands parallel with the corporate lawyer who has sold away their soul for the well being of a client and the pharmaceutical chair making decisions based on their numbers rather than how the world should look or be. The shaper of empty words pretending to change the world from behind a screen. I feel impassioned in my own published words, telling the government to take more accountability and responsibility for their negligence, and yet I know the reality: nobody gives a shit. My father, the blue-collar worker, sure doesn't. My mother, a nail technician, sure doesn't. Why should anyone care what I have to say; like a rich and famous celebrity taking the stage to talk income inequality, the very 'act' makes me a hypocrite.    

We discussed Bell and Golombisky's article about voices and silence as it pretrains to women and women of color in the classroom, and the question that plagued for a week after reading this was, 'so what? Does improving the classroom in various ways negate the banking nature of the class as an institution? To even teach a class that the teacher wants to teach, you need the approval of so many bodies and the approval chain could take a year before the syllabus even lands in front of the eyes of a prospective student. We can't change that aspect. Our budget, careers, and integrity depend on other people's approval of us.  Fassett and Warren pointed this out, where certain research needed approval because people didn't take the research seriously without the backing up of someone from in the system. Academia only exists because of a system of capital escalation; we need submissions of work every year to keep our jobs, we need to keep publishing, rather than to put our best foot out there in the eradication of what we perceive as ills of the world. #LifeGoesOn with or without our two cents.

But, indictment of the system is not an indictment on people. Academics are able to find time regardless to help in small ways. Volunteer for their religious groups, community needs, sponsor important changes both local and global. Being in the system means that #LifeGoesOn in a possibly new way for someone else. 'Help me save one more', Desmond Doss once said. We need to embrace this hypocrisy, and not pretend that we are humans, too, ones that are unable to impact everyone with are meticulous though tiny words. It's an effort everyday to not take a long rest. To give up on something like academia. But, sometimes, inspiring one person to change the world is more relevant and important than simply daydreaming about a better world arriving through magic. If you keep trying, maybe someday the small hole that puzzled St Augustine will finally contain the ocean and even the vastness of the oppressively sea will appear to suddenly vanish.   

        #LifeGoesOn