The Narrative Paradigm - Persuasion through the Story



Youngsters

From ImNoSaint, Thursday, October 16, 2008

I sat in an older audience in attending a forum Tuesday, an event where Mike Ramsdell, author of A Train to Potevka, spoke to his fans and peers. Mike's retired from his service in our country's covert operations, and Mike talked about Patriotism. I like Mike. He's affable, certainly approachable and has a great sense of humor, calculated even, but what would anyone expect from a person who's learned that correct communication is a matter of life or death.

It's what Mike said and what the audience confirmed without hesitation that flamed a slow burn I've been feeling for awhile, a burn stoked lately by the president of the college where I teach in referring to our students as “youngsters.” Mike made a remark indicating that our young people don't know what patriotism is, or don't appreciate what it means.

References to young people are tritely familiar. Go back any generation and hear the same complaints. I catch myself making much the same discount with my own teenagers and reel at the phrases I say that I promised I'd never mutter.

I live on the very back porch of the greediest generation in the history of this country. Born in 1962, the US census bureau puts my birth date two years short of Generation X. Strauss and Howe in Generations puts me at the front porch instead. I'd like to claim it. X.

Boomers lowered their own tax liabilities and loop-holed their way into capital gains that have ultimately shut the door on home ownership for Gen Z, our current young people. They traded infrastructure laid and poured by their fathers and mothers for big box, flippers and time share development, octaning their way through opulence never before experienced by previous generations in their SUV's parked in the McMansions that have replaced the hilltops and bluffs in my home town.

The youngsters work. Call centers, service jobs, retail, door-to-door alarms and insulation and siding. They bag groceries and lug golf bags. They mow lawns and care for sequestered sick old parents as CNA's at minimum wage. I doubt they'll see their Social Security benefits, though they're still paying into them. Wall Street. Main Street. Any address tied to what once was an economic benefit for the American dream of any college student now terminates in the same country code, a code now being sold off to world markets to bail us out of our own greed. Young people did not put us here.

And all the gray heads in that forum audience nod at Mike’s declaration that our young people don't know what patriotism is. You could hear the tisk-tisk-tisking.

Ruth is a student of mine. Recently married, young, attractive, and a US Army Reservist. Her husband just got home from his tour in Mosul where there's an airbase and just today US soldiers arrested three Al-Qaeda members. Ruth deploys in a few months. She's going to Afghanistan.

My reaction to her disclosure wasn't what she expected. I could see her surprise when I voiced concerns and fears about her deployment. Whatever happens in November, it's a pretty sure bet we're going to escalate activity in Afghanistan. We'll be there much longer than we'll be in Iraq. But she didn't blink. She said she'll be there twelve months and then she'll be home. She's enthusiastic and dedicated, looking forward to her service there.

Mitch is one of the brightest, articulate male students I've ever had. Returned from a mission for his church he dedicated himself to his major and surpassed expectations. He fell in love and got married and shortly after his honeymoon, Mitch went off to Basic. He's been selected for OCS in the Marines. His internship is his training and his superiors quickly discovered why Mitch should lead Marines.

Angela stopped by my office this week to talk about what she can do with her degree. She can do anything with any degree. Unafraid, bold, sharp. She asked candidly about other universities and colleges in the State. “My husband said I can go anywhere I want.” I asked her what her husband does and her disposition revealed her patriotism. “He just got home from Iraq. He’s being stitched up.”

Chris is soon to be sixteen. His love for cars is eclipsed only by what he feels for his country. On a visit to the Air Force Museum at Hill Air Force Base, we happened to be there on Veteran's Day. Each aircraft in the displays was accompanied by vets, crew members who had flown missions in similar or in a couple of cases the very planes in those hangers. Chris was just a little tyke, maybe six, and on our way out he stopped and left my side to walk over to a vet standing beneath a B-17, Chris' favorite war bird. He reached up and shook his hand and said, “Thanks for what you did for our country.”

A while back after the 222nd returned from its first tour in Iraq, Chris and I came across a soldier shopping at our supermarket. Chris went up to him and did the same thing.

His fifteenth birthday was spent aboard the USS Nimitz. The day was awesome with a demonstration of Navy might and the determination of Navy young people. Some rubbed off on him, and I'll admit that scares me, like Ruth's deployment, or Mitch's appointment, not because I fear their competencies - I know of no one more capable – it's because I love and respect them for who they are and what they represent and for their willingness to serve. It's not that Ruth or Mitch or Angela’s husband didn't have other things to do. They didn't enlist because it was the least objectionable alternative. Angela doesn’t consider a least objectionable alternative. She’s committed. Chris is weighing his options.

Young people.

And there are the punks at Jimmy John's with their girly pants around their thighs and their bangs hanging in their eyes, and the pierced and tattooed girls who flip their tongue studs between black lipstick; the gamers and the skaters and the emos. They're kids and they're a small but highly visual part of the bigger kid-picture. Few take notice of the ones not crying out for attention. Few see the Christofers out there. (As much as I'd like to take the credit for Chris' patriotic soul, this is a choice that he's made in following the example of vets and patriots living and dead in his own family.)

Social statistics indicate that some of our young people's parents are struggling with debt, others with infidelity, Internet porn addiction, and others substance abuse. Most kids come home to an empty house at the end of the day because their single mother or single father or both parents are working. Certainly, there are social issues here and they spill out in manifestations in young people, again tritely familiar. There's nothing new here.

But there needs to be. There needs to be a new attitude among advanced generations, old people and boomers in regards to young people. It's time to stop perpetuating stereotypes and conceding to group-thinking that youngsters are inherently <insert derogatory adjective here>.

These attitudes inhibit inspiration, they squelch determination and undermine hope. The generation gap has been seen as one that distances from the young side. Sitting in Mike's audience made me realize that the gulf is well retreated on the old.

Reconnect. Recognize the quality in the hearts of young people who pay your Social Security with their wages. Reverence the service they'll be to you and our country as uniformed patriots, as voting patriots, as working and tax-paying patriots, and even if all they amount to are the patriot mothers and fathers of Generation A.

In a display case on a cabinet in my home is the triangular folded flag of a dead veteran, my father. His military service began his nineteenth year.

The Epistemic Approach - Persuasion through the Analysis of Knowledge


The Beauty Found in Contradiction
Filmmaker Helen Whitney graced our campus last week with her lectures, Spiritual Landscapes: A Life in Film. Each was a look and commentary of some of her work including Faith and Doubt at Ground ZeroThe Mormons, and most recently Forgiveness: A Time to Love and a Time to Hate.
I sat and listened to her Friday evening. She’s driven by the religious experience and how it drives human behavior in contexts ranging from crises of faith to the reconciliation of, “that what was will never be again.” And she does so from a unique secular position.
That’s why her work resonates with me. The shades are off in her search, any agenda thwarted in the purity of her questions. And that’s why I was so affected by the message of that evening. I’ve since tried to get a grip on that feeling by writing here.
I think it’s fair to say, generally, that we value consistency. We like, or rather we want the quotidian order of things to go the way we’ve predicted. If you’ve ever turned your car’s key in the ignition and have nothing happen as a result, you know what I’m saying here. The failure of any appliance in the home sends us scrambling to reach whatever that functionality was before it went on the fritz.
Remember that moment before the car accident, before that diagnosis, before the phone call, before the process server. We were tending to some purpose, perhaps lost in the routine of the day to have things change unpredictably. And most of us don’t like that. We don’t like uncertainty. We want that what was to last.
When certainty fails, the earth moves beneath our feet sometimes subtle enough for a new perspective, other times traumatic enough for a new paradigm. When it’s the truth that fails, beliefs change.
The search for constancy, certainty, continuity is religion. When Whitney began her research on Mormons she attended a Latter-day Saint Sacrament meeting. This happened to be on the first Sunday of the month, a Sabbath set aside for fasting, and a meeting reserved for the expression of conviction. As members of that congregation stood and declared the construct of their belief, it wasn’t done in uncertain terms like I think it’s true, I hope it’s true, I believe it’s true.
What stunned Helen was the disclosure of these witnesses that they knew it was true, convicted of it. Certain. I’ve often sat in Fast and Testimony meetings marveling at the same idea because in contrast, faith is not concrete, it is not certain. If it were, the point would be self-defeating. Nevertheless, here is a congregation, a religion that not only professes the certainty of its principles, the certainty within them assuages the mourners, calms the afflicted, and encourages any who struggle. At least that’s the idea, the implication, the promise.
And then the crash, the interpretation of the mammogram, the voice of the Highway Patrol trooper, the divorce decree. That what was will never be again. Faith is tested.
In the test faith is promised to assuage, calm and encourage. This seems to work for so many people. Often the faith of many is sought to ease the broken-hearted through collective prayer and fasting; goodwill toward those who hurt, who lost, who struggle. When faith fails, the contradiction within its ascribed certainty seems irreconcilable. Faith becomes a contradiction when it doesn’t restore a certainty that what once was.
Maria is my friend and colleague, a deeply faithful woman who lives in a junction of influences that are contradictory. She told me she lives with contradiction, comparing to that celestial moment when one can watch the sun set and look to the east and see the moon rise simultaneously, caught between heavenly bodies. She finds beauty in between, in the paradox, in the abandon of certainty.
The film, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, illustrates the same in a story of a boy who tries to make sense out of the most senseless day of his history and ours; September 11. He lost his father in the collapse of the World Trade Center and struggles to find some certainty in making sense of a key he’s convinced his father left for him, and to discover what it unlocks. At the risk of a spoiler, he doesn’t. Sense never comes. The credits roll without it.
When the earth moves and one loses their faith, the evaluation reflects back to them that the reason for its failure is not inherent in the virtue of faith, but rather in their unworthiness or their weakness.
Friday evening, listening to Helen, watching excerpts from her work, the question illuminated in my thinking once again, why can’t we be okay with that? With uncertainty, without making sense, without having all the answers, without having some divine reason as purpose for crisis?
Having been on both sides of this coin let me relate. When I held a conviction for what I believed to be true I found great comfort in its certainty. Many of my questions were answered, even in the wake of fathering a remarkable son whose life would be a constant struggle and would be cut short, the circumstances of which could have been prevented.
There was a certainty in knowing that if I did all that was expected, obedient to saving ordinances and faithful to covenants, that I would not only see him again, I’d be sealed to him as his earthly father, enabled to live with him forever and realize the blessings of his perfected resurrected state. There seemed to be some sense in the malpractice that resulted in his daily suffering and truncated life. My faith made it easy to reconcile the contradictions of suffering and a higher-power. The way he lived his life induced beauty in it.
It was at this time when I became reacquainted with a sense I had discovered as a Mormon missionary, an invasive premonition that one would sooner deny than validate but couldn’t, because it was the truth about how faith evaporates when you consider yourself unworthy. Guilt then overrides any consideration that this sense was truly complementary to my physical ones instead of subsidized by a shitty self-concept. If you feel that you may never be good enough, the certainty of heaven becomes unreachable and gone is the comfort in its conviction.
On the dissent side of the coin I eradicated the inherent evaluation of worthiness. It took a long time. It became a non-condition of my relationship with my dead son and subsequently my living son and daughter. I stopped being compelled for righteousness’ sake, I removed ideas of heaven and hell, and engaged in living without these conditions, without predication, without sense.
While within this uncertainty there’s much less the comfort I once found in conviction, there is no longer the overarching emphasis to figure out why. Why anything. No matter what decisions I make, no matter my impetus for good, life will do what she wants and once again, what once was will never be and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I choose good for goodness' sake.
There is peace in understanding now that I don’t need certainty. What I need, instead, and the irony here is delicious, is faith.
Faith is that beauty found in contradiction.

The Dialectic Approach - Persuasion through Logic