About
Rosey Stuurmans took the photo for the banner. I edited it.
In my graduation speech for my International Affairs class, I wrote that education is the act of unknowing. “I don’t know what it means, but I like the phrase,” my dad said after reading the speech.
He is an educator, and I am an aspiring journalist. In my view, it is the responsibility of the journalist to educate so I have decided to name my blog “Jar-ed-ucation.” My entries will range from politics, to poems, to photographs. I will write about the upheaval in Bolivia and my own experiences here in the Bay Area of California. The title captures my own formation as a person, a citizen and writer. I hope that when people visit my site and read my posts they will find that what I share compliments their education.
My blog was formerly “Marchildon’s Musings.” Aside from being difficult to tell a stranger how to spell my name to get to the site, it was determined that I am not truly a muser. Often, I think and write passionately with a sense of outrage, not with the quiet pace of musing. I considered briefly using the word revolutionary in the title – something like “dispatches from the revolution.” But, disgracefully, the word may be worn and tiresome. It’s use may have also hurt my chances of getting a job or immediately caused readers to dismiss me.
Education also attracted me because it implies a progressive realization. In my speech I urged my peers and our guests to unknow what they know, rethink what they think, and disbelieve what they believe.
I grew up in a fundamentalist church where the members clung to wild myths under the false pretension that they are the “Word of God.” These legends (e.g. Adam and Eve, Creation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection of Jesus, and the Rapture) are thought to be actual events, not symbolic stories. In an environment where snakes talk, men are rise from the dead, and hell really exists, cognitive dissonance occurs with startling regularity. With brains that are well trained to believe the unbelievable, modern Christians campaign for immorality while preaching morality. Sadly, they cheer on our conquest of the Middle East. Flag waving on American soil stains Mesopotamian soil with the Iraqi blood, maybe from 1.2 million of them.
Though I am now an apostate, I still admire the socialist lifestyles of the early Christians. The frequency of war might decrease if more adopted the pacifist teachings of Jesus. We would redistribute our wealth if we were convicted by his words of giving your second coat to a man who does not own one. The third world might rise if first world governments practiced his parable advocating for debt forgiveness. Class lines might blur tremendously if more did as Jesus and socialized with the “undesirables.”
Passing a personal threshold for such cognitive dissonance, I broke with the church. Rejecting the powerful ideology of church teaching profoundly affected all subsequent intellectual development.
So, I like intellectual currents that counter mainstream thinking. I hang up art that questions. I read subversive writers like Kerouac, Mailer, Vonnegut, and Marquez. I sympathize with the underdog. I dislike dogmatism. I identify more with the outcast than the popular figure.
As far as journalism goes, I prefer sources that muster the courage to seek conclusions. Objectivity for me does not require balance. True, there are alternative interpretations, perceptions bias information and facts can be selected, but the journalist should work like the detective– looking for clues leading to the truth. (Not that there is one “truth.”) I read magazines like Mother Jones, the New Yorker, Adbusters and Harper’s.
A very intelligent man I met one time told me that rational debate is not possible on television. I tend to agree, and have taken what feels like the radical step of giving up television. It’s not that the visual medium is inherently bad or lacks the capacity to enlighten; It’s that economic structure of TV that prioritizes the trivial and emphasizes the sensational. Conversely, writing forces the author to organize thoughts and construct arguments. The written word must be compelling, whereas visual art already has a leg up because it doesn’t force the viewer to think before it can catch their attention.
I want to use photographs and maybe eventually videos to enrich my writing, because their are grammatical structures to the visual mediums that escape writing (the oppositie is also obviously, if not more, true). I want to join the ranks of the muckrackers, so this blog is my place to develop my writing skills and share my thoughts on a public forum.
Please feel free to comment and offer suggestions.