. . . all of these posts on “this is where I was when 9/11 happened and this is how I reacted to it” make me feel very uncomfortable. The statements of the “and the world was never the same after 9/11” variety make me even more uncomfortable. And then there is the supremely annoying “there was such a sense of solidarity after 9/11, why can’t we have that back instead of the political bickering?”

The worst ones, however, are the ones who place “9/11” and “the loss of innocence” in the same sentence.

It seems like inanity is the favorite response of many people to traumatic events. 9/11 has been literally drowned in platitudes of the worst order.

The Full of Promise Rising Stars (FPRS) are so successful in their teenage year and their twenties for precisely the same reason why their thirties will be drab and their forties an exercise in complete and utter misery. All of their early successes are motivated not by an internal need to excel in these particular areas but, rather, by the constant need to win the approval and acceptance of adults. The fantastic grades, the awards at school and then, later, at college allow them to play the role of the perfect child whom everybody praises for being good and obedient. Such kids are celebrated by adults for embodying those adults’ dream of seeing an unproblematic, “perfect” child.

The tragedy, however, is that in the process of trying to embody the dreams of adults, such a perfect child never gets a chance to figure out what his or her own dreams are. The entire goal of such a kid’s existence is to please. When s/he grows up, however, there are no more adults to please. Now, you suddenly become an adult, and the criteria you need to fulfill to be successful at this new stage of your life are completely different. Those same adults who praised you and encouraged you are now competing with you. The daily boost of self-esteem suddenly disappears.

Many FPRS attempt to reduce the psychological burden of feeling like their promise amounted to nothing by having kids and pushing them into the role of adult-pleasing little prodigies. These are the parents who boast that their kid could read at three, speak Chinese at five, won 5 dancing competitions by the age of 6, had the best scores at all tests in primary school, etc. This allows them to relive vicariously their own stellar moments of FPRSness. Then, of course, their children become FPRS, and the entire cycle repeats itself.

An alternative way out of the inevitable disillusionment of FPRSness is to do what one was supposed to do during the teenage years and the twenties and start figuring out who one really is, outside of anybody else’s expectations or desires. Of course, this is a task that becomes progressively more difficult as one grows older. More often than not, a successful journey out of the FPRS destiny includes renouncing all the people-pleasing achievements of the previous years and finding a completely new direction of personal development. And that can never be easy.

Two posts in my blogroll made me ask myself this question today. The first one, provides the following quote from Sylvia Plath:

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”

The second one tells a story of two kids who were stellar students in high school, whom everybody considered super promising, but who didn’t manage to make it through college despite all the promise:

The scholarship offers rolled in, and he took the one from the school that accepted his AA degree and promised to fund his first two years in law school. He was a college junior at 18. His cousin from another state—which at the time promised free tuition at state schools for any resident who had earned a specific high school rank and grade point average—had one burning ambition: to get a “free ride.” And he did. Predictably, both flunked out. The golden boy didn’t survive the first year.

We all know those people who, in their youth, are described by everybody as rising stars. “Watch this kid,” people say. “He will go far.” “She is so full of promise.” “They have such a bright future ahead of them.”

More often than not, the bright future remains just that, a future, and the promise never gets fulfilled. The brilliant kids reap admiration, rewards, and applause for years as they glide slowly into their thirties. And this is where (maybe a little earlier or a little later) the applause and the admiration stop. Nobody celebrates their promise any more because the time for promising is long gone by this time. The former golden kids (a term suggested to me by the third great post I read today) are left feeling confused and anxious.

“Why was everybody celebrating my every little achievement yesterday and now suddenly nobody seems to care?” they ask themselves. “Why am I suddenly not everybody’s precious prodigy any more? How did I suddenly find myself in the role of an ordinary, nondescript adult?”

It is all the more difficult for such people to settle into middle age comfortably since their teens and their twenties were so filled with admiration and adoration that it becomes impossible for them to accept that all this cheering has suddenly gone away.

So where do these Full of Promise Rising Stars (FPRS, for short) come from and, if one happens to be a FPRS, what can one do to escape from the seemingly inevitable disillusionment of growing older without having achieved anything all that great? Why is it so hard to transform a promising youth into a happy adulthood and a brilliant middle age?

I’ll tell you all these things in my next post.

I’m reading a novel by a Spanish writer called Julia Navarro, and at some point a character says,

A while ago he had requested a meeting with Leon Trotsky, and finally, the Russian politician accepted.

“That’s weird,” I thought. ‘This is happening at the time when Trotsky is living in exile in Mexico. Why would a Russian politician arrange his meetings for him?”

It took me a while to realize that the “Russian politician” in question was supposed to be Trotsky. Of course, not only was Trotsky a Jew, he was never a politician in Russia. He was a revolutionary in the Russian Empire and a politician in the Soviet Union. And he wasn’t even a Russian Jew. Trotsky was born in Ukraine.

This casual reference to a Ukrainian Jew as a Russian reminded me of  a video clip for a documentary I had seen earlier today. “The Russians made a decision. . .” the narrator enunciated, as the footage of Iosif Stalin and Lavrenti Beria appeared on screen. Both these men were, of course, Georgians. Stalin spoke Russian with a strong accent until the day he died. Still, ignoramuses around the world can’t manage to distinguish a Georgian, an Armenian, a Ukrainian, a Moldovan or a Jew from a Russian.

Maybe I should refer to the Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc. as “English.” They do speak English, so they must all be English, right? Just like Mexicans, Peruvians, Chileans, Dominicans, and Guatemalans must all be “Spanish.”

Seriously, the ignorance is daunting.

From Inside Higher Ed:

Many students say that they avoid early morning classes so they can get enough sleep to do well. But a study by psychology professors at St. Lawrence University, of students there, finds that the assumption of those who favor sleeping in is only partly correct. The study found that those with later classes indeed get more sleep. But those who get more sleep appear to use their rest to go out more and to abuse alcohol more than do other students. So it is the slightly more tired students who are in the early classes who earn higher grade-point averages, the professors found.

I don’t know about their grade-point average, but the students who don’t go out a lot and have fun with friends are missing an important stage in their development. Nothing is sadder than a 20-year-old who obsesses about some stupid grade-point average instead of enjoying existence to the fullest. When I hear a kid telling me gravely, “Oh, who has time for a hobby / sport / boyfriend / girlfriend / a pet, etc. I have to do homework!”, I always feel sorry for them. It’s the kids who never partied enough in their youth who get into horrible mid-life crises in their forties and start making up for not having had any fun in their twenties.

This is why when I come into class on Monday, I always ask my students, “Did you get to party over the weekend? No? That’s no good, folks.” And before I leave them on Friday, I always say, “Have a great weekend and don’t forget to have fun!”

As I said before, my Ukrainian aunt Natasha is visiting Canada for the first time ever. She’s seen Montreal where she visited the Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Lion King musical, the Biodome, and the Jean-Paul Gautier exhibit at the Fine Arts Museum. She has been to Ottawa and to St. Saveur. Now, she is going to Nova Scotia where her twin sister lives.

“So, Aunt Natasha, what is the most surprising, exciting and unusual thing you have seen in Canada so far?” I ask.

“Oh, everything is so beautiful and amazing here,” she says. “But there is one thing that absolutely stunned me.”

‘What is it?” I inquire.

“When it rains, the roads become clean immediately! There are no puddles and no mud! That is so amazing!” Aunt Natasha enthuses.

I know exactly how she feels. When I first came to Canada, one thing that really stood out to me was that there was no dog shit on the pavements. You could walk around for days without seeing a single pile of dog shit. In Ukraine, you could barely take a step without stepping into it.

People often judge cultural realities by their own frame of reference. When my sister first went to a Canadian CEGEP, she tried telling her new friends about Ukraine. They were mostly unimpressed with her stories because the reality she described was impossible for them to compare to their own.

One day, however, my sister mentioned that students never had lockers at school and had to lug all their stuff with them all day long. This really stunned her Canadian friends.

“Oh my God! That is so horrible!” they exclaimed. “How could you guys live like that? What an atrocity! It’s a total violation of human rights!”

These kids couldn’t relate to bigger issues but the absence of school lockers really appalled them.

I just found a description of yet another book by people who like nothing more than to dump on the younger generation:

“Every generation claims that the next one has been coddled and spoiled, but it really may be true this time,” writes Ken S. Coates, arts dean at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and Bill Morrison, history professor emeritus at the University of Northern B.C. in Prince George. “Something new and nasty is going on with university students these days, and there’s more trouble in store.”

The authors blame societal permissiveness, child-centred educational and parenting styles, overwhelming materialism, video games, sexualized media and the guilt of two-income families.

As you can see, the insufferable old fogies who wrote this piece of silly garbage realize how boring and unoriginal their premise is. Whenever people feel they have entered into old age (which is not a chronological but an ideological concept), they invariably start issuing proclamations as to how the younger generation is so much worse than they were in their youth, i.e. the time when the sugar was sweeter and the sun shone brighter.

What’s sad is that even though the authors realize that they are making themselves look ridiculous by repeating the age-old invective against younger people, they can’t help themselves. The need to condemn the young for having what the authors don’t have any more (namely, youth) is too strong.

It is so strong, actually, that it forces the authors to come up with a series of explanation for why the kids today are so bad, mad, and dangerous. Let’s look at them one by one.

Societal permissiveness – I find that when people complain about “permissiveness” it means that they simply bemoan their own incapacity to take advantage of said permissiveness.

Child-centred educational and parenting styles – can anybody imagine parenting that isn’t centered on the child who’s being parented? It’s like condemning book-reading for being too book-centered. Or eating for being food-centered.

Overwhelming materialism – I’m kind of surprised that the authors who are so overwhelmed with materialism don’t just place their work in free access online (just to combat the materialism, you know) but sell it for $22.95 in paperback. In my experience, whenever anybody starts screeching about the horrible materialism of everybody else, this is the surest sign they want to make money off those others.

Video games – I didn’t know there were still people who evoked this silly bug-bear to support what is supposed to be a serious argument. I, for one, refuse to believe that playing video games is a less noble pursuit than publishing the kind of books that these authors have done. Actually, I’d much rather people just played video games instead of addressing their psychological issues through dumping on young people.

Sexualized media – this one is just beyond hilarious. Do the authors even speak English? Or are they, indeed, trying to say that the media is being objectified sexually and that sad fact somehow magically makes today’s kids all bad? I can just imagine a teenager in her room getting all hot and bothered about the media. “Oooh, the NYTimes, you are so sexy!”

Guilt of two-income families – what does this even mean? Please tell me if I’m wrong, but I’m perceiving anti-feminism behind all this jargon. Are these authors suggesting that women who work are supposed to feel guilty about that? And that working parents are actually bad for children? In spite of all the overwhelming evidence that has amply demonstrated that the opposite is true?

To conclude, as a middle-aged college professor, I can testify to the fact that today’s eighteen and twenty-five-year-olds are absolutely the best, most amazing, inspiring and intelligent generation ever. Just twenty minutes ago, I couldn’t leave the classroom because my first-year students wanted to continue the discussion about the ideological appropriation of history. It’s a Friday afternoon but they want to talk about something like this after class.

And then look at the young readers of this blog: Pen, Nominatissima, Jaime, David K., el, and others. These people are the world’s future, and I only hope the future is as bright as they are.

Honestly, I have no patience with folks who dump on the young people.

How do you feel about the following statement:

Science is the litmus test on the validity of the educational enterprise. If a school teaches real science, it’s a pretty safe bet that all other departments are sound. If it teaches bogus science, everything else is suspect…. I want a real college, not one that rejects facts, knowledge, and understanding because they conflict with a narrow religious belief. Any college that lets theology trump fact is not a college; it is an institution of indoctrination. It teaches lies. Colleges do not teach lies. Period.

Does it shock you? Appall you? Mildly surprise you? Or not really?

Would it, however, shock you to know that this statement got a tenured professor, an eminent educator with a handful of teaching awards, fired from the college where he had taught for 35 years?  Inside Higher Ed reports that Erskine College fired Professor Crenshaw for expressing these ideas in spite of the fact that he has tenure. Religious fanatics who called for the professor’s dismissal referred to his teaching as “the triumph of anti-Christ” and “secular brain-dribble.”

Well, at least the secular folks have brains. The fanatics seem to recognize that they are terrified all this brain-power might dribble on them and contaminate their empty heads with – oh, horror! – knowledge.

Shame on you, Erskine College. You have traveled the path from being an educational institution into becoming a laughing stock of every educated, reasonable person in the country. You have to decide whether you want to run an indoctrination school for religious fanatics or an actual college where people receive education. Nobody will take you seriously if you don’t mend you ways and invite Professor Crenshaw back with an apology.

I know that people will now tell me, “Well what do you expect from a Presbyterian college?” Actually, what I expect is what an alumna of this college described as its past:

What a shame the Erskine of old no longer exists. It mattered not what faith or non-faith one practiced during my years there. It was a time to grow and bond with close friends I still have until this day – time of discovery – finding out who I was – who I wanted to be.

I would not be the confident woman I am today if it were not for Erskine and professors who made me learn to think – such as Dr. Crenshaw. (And yes, I would never deign to use his first name. He deserves more respect than that).

Thank you for the difference you have made in my life, Dr. Crenshaw. Keep writing on this board. Eventually someone will listen.

I agree with Ms. Janie Bryan Simpson, what a shame!