Hang in there. The semester is almost over, and following the endurance test called finals week, the majority of you will move out of the pressure cooker and into a well-deserved break. This should help heal and fortify you for the next stage of your academic growth, or for those graduating to the nonacademic world, the next stage of your life.
Your individual progress is due in large part to your intelligence, self-reliance, imagination and courage. In some instances, faculty, staff and student organizations may have assisted you, and University programs are in place at UNM exclusively for the purpose of making your accomplishments easier to accomplish. Very likely, they provided opportunities to expand your knowledge, explore your own creativity and experience and strengthen your capacity for making your own decisions. This, after all, is the stuff from which adulthood is fashioned. Many of us learned it in just the same way - one decision at a time. Some of us are still learning it.
Such persons and programs are easy to recognize. Your interaction with them makes sense, you have the impression that your issue is the most important, any proposed resolution sets you as the decision maker, options are explained to you, you are directed to people who can genuinely help with your issue, and you are invited to come back for another try if the first attempt fails.
In other instances, you may have succeeded despite being directed toward people and situations that seemed to have little interest in your academic or personal growth. In those instances, you may have felt like you were being run through a maze. You may have had the sense you were only being given small pieces of information where you knew a larger picture would better prepare you to deal with the situation. You might have been forced to attend meetings where you were quickly told what to do, rather than being provided with the facts and resources that would allow you to make that decision yourself. You may not have been given critical contacts and resources in a timely manner, and as a result, you suffered the consequences of a problem that could have been resolved but wasn't. You may have been directed away from human beings and only had online programs or other machine substitutes to deal with. You may have been told that nothing could be done about your issue and you'd just have to live with the consequences.
These faux services have migrated from the corporate culture and now exist in many of our public services: justice, health care, public welfare and even education. This is recognized by the general population, as we can see in the results of our last election, which brought hopeful signs for economic reform, words, and sometimes actions that demand real accountability from our frequently overpaid, frequently disappointing CEOs and other managers. It was a renewed cry for citizens to reclaim their democracy.
Some believe that the solution lies in our electing better representatives and by changing appointed positions to elected ones. Others believe it will come from more direct participation by all citizens in our own governance. Either would likely help.
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In a democracy, what exists is there because the citizens allow it to be there. This can be for insidious reasons: You are not told the truth, information is withheld from you, marketing methods present you with a happy-face version of the issues, which deludes you into thinking all is under control and nothing is needed from you. You can be directed to activities and devices that pretend you are involved in the decision-making process, but they really exist primarily to keep you quiet so that a small group of largely self-proclaimed leaders aren't troubled by you as they do their "important work." You have been given the message, subtly or not, that if you stand up and make a sound, your life could be much worse.
Or, it can simply be because you live in a society that, accidentally or deliberately, has been constructed to compel most of us to worry about our ability to acquire or keep a livelihood, to the exclusion of practically all else, a very bad thing in a functioning democracy. Fortunately, it only takes strong citizen action to change something that needs changing.
So why tell you this when you're about to go on holiday? Because you'll have some time on your hands. Each of the items above are several essays unto themselves. You, no doubt, can think of equally important topics. Perhaps you will find time to write one, or even a few thoughtful pieces to share with your community. Or, if an essay is too much for a needed summer break, you could just jot a few lines about our community and ideas for making things better, so we can learn from each other. Then, when the fall term calls you back, we'll be really ready to get to work.
Alan Morgan has been employed by UNM since 1996 and has been an academic adviser since 1998. He is a past chairman of the Bernalillo County Green Party, past president of the UNM Staff Council and a founding member and former officer of the staff union, United Staff-UNM. He can be reached at Unmcoil@aol.com.
Editor's note: The Daily Lobo will be happy to hear your comments, which can be submitted for publication on our opinion page weekly during the summer.
