Things my students teach me

Online studying

The line from the musical “The King and I” comes to mind this afternoon: “For if you become a teacher, by your pupils you are taught.”

When I ask my students to take on a real-life project in their introductory public relations classes, I learn more than I dreamed possible when I first took up teaching.  Two of those projects are on my mind this afternoon.  In a book I’ve just finished reading – Sylvia Nasar’s incredible biography of mathematical genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash, titled “A Beautiful Mind” (the same title as the film about Nash, starring Russell Crowe ), I learned that Nash was hospitalized several times for his paranoid schizophrenia.  One of his hospitalizations was at the Carrier Clinic in New Jersey.

I’ve been reading a lot about the Carrier Clinic over the past year, because one of my students wrote about it in her classes.  It was at Carrier that Nash found one of the psychiatrists who would help him the most; that information only added to the respect I had already developed through reading my student’s work.

On a lighter note, another student chose to write about Missoula, Montana’s tiny Superheroes of Kindness – the 3- and 4-year-olds from the Missoula Community School who commit acts of kindness throughout the year wearing capes with hearts on the back.  The kids have, says the local Missoulian, “comforted the sick and elderly, painted a fence, handed out paper flowers during Bike-Walk-Bus Week, cleaned up their neighborhood on Earth Day and – most recently – delivered 500 pounds of food to the Missoula Food Bank” (2011, Missoulian).   It was wonderful to see a front-page update in the Missoulian the day I got to town for my mid-winter break. You would not think that such a project would have a public relations problem, but learning how to handle what  became nationwide attention was something that my student wanted to tackle.

There have been so many other projects as well.   There is the nonprofit organization working to help girls get an education in Zambia; there was a well-thought-out concern over the fact that for too long, the NFL had no social media policy; there were two students in separate states and separate classes who were very concerned about community-supported agriculture and how it could change not just our eating habits, but the entire food distribution system.

Bear in mind that as public relations instructors, we aren’t simply teaching public relations practice and principles; we’re also doing a lot of fact-checking on our students’ essays.  I remain ever grateful that years ago I was formally trained in computer and data-base research (training both expanded and reinforced through my studies at Syracuse), because it’s fairly easy to find the needed information and check to ensure a student’s accuracy.

When I have this rare break between classes (there is no real summer break, because the two universities where I teach are on different systems; the classes overlap in the spring, summer and fall months), I have some quiet moments to step back and reflect on the work my students have done.  I know that some of them chafe under the strict rules of the class; and there are always one or two who don’t think the rule apply to them.  But on the whole, and invariably, I am astonished and grateful at the work they have done.  Even across the keyboard in this seemingly impersonal world of online teaching, I can see the light bulbs turn on about the third or fourth week of any given class.   Suddenly those “Aha!” moments start and almost seem contagious on the discussion boards.  From that point on, my work is easier; quite often, just pointing out the next direction to follow is enough to make the students dig in and do some amazing work.

In the meantime, I get to read about things that enlarge my world and provide me with new perspectives.   I learn more about the communities in which I spend so much time – the Portland, Oregon metro area and Missoula, Montana – and I also learn more about our nation as a whole.   Best of all, my students are teaching me faith in the generation coming up through the ranks – as well as in the mid-life generation (some Baby Boomers, some younger than) now re-training for new jobs and news careers.  The American “can-do” spirit is alive and well; the desire to know what one doesn’t know is alive and well.  I’m heading into 2012 with a great belief that there is reason for hope and reason for optimism.

Entering today’s work force: two more qualities to add

I recently posted an article for my students entitled “The skills employers desire in today’s PR pro.” (http://linkd.in/rFp1fz)

Written by Arik Hanson for Ragan’s PR Daily (Nov. 17), the article is actually a series of short interviews, asking working professionals what skills and attitudes are most valuable to them when they hire new practitioners.  Good writing and storytelling came up frequently, as we would expect; so did a driving curiosity.  Strategic thinking, conceptual thinking, the ability to use metrics and analysis – these all come up as well.  One person mentioned creativity and resourcefulness, and several mentioned the ability to combine the effects of social media and traditional media; I think any of us who have been in the field for any length of time would agree with those thoughts as well.

But in today’s marketplace – and particularly for those looking for a job – I want to add a couple of things: dogged determination and a willingness to go back to Square 1.  I was an entrepreneur for over 25 years, and still work independently for various clients in addition to my teaching duties.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to remind myself of my brother’s very good advice:  “Turn over every stone.”  The willingness to look everywhere and anywhere for the next job or the next client is critical in a down market; the ability to keep going without giving up is both exhausting and necessary.

Couple with that determination has to be a willingness to go back to Square 1, and by that I mean a willingness to start at the beginning – again.  The salary or hourly rate may be lower; the benefits may not be there; you may have to build from scratch all over again, or – if this is your first time out in the work world – you may need to lower your expectations and be willing to accept a less-than-ideal job.  In this market, a job is a job.  Being open and flexible to something that is not what you have hoped for – or indeed, even worked for – will take you farther in the log run than waiting until that perfect job or high-rolling client comes along. I’ve often told my students that if they can’t find an entry-level PR job they should consider something in media sales – selling advertising space and time.  Learning the other side of media and learning to sell are two extremely valuable sets of skills to have for anyone in public communication.  You learn to deal with people; you learn what makes people tick.  You learn the differences between advertising, promotion, marketing and media relations from the inside out.  You’ll never forget any of that training.

Remember that looking for a job while you’re employed – at all!  – is the best way to look for a job.  Your relationships are still there, and you still have the opportunity to build new relationships; you’re not holed up somewhere just wishing.

Last spring I asked a couple of students what they planned to do after graduation.  One said, “Oh, I don’t know.  I haven’t planned, really.  I’m sure something good will come along.”  I cringed.  Good things don’t just happen to us; we have to go out and make them happen.  As I used to say when running my public relations firm in Montana, “No one pays me just for showing up.  Somehow or another, I always have to produce results.”

That’s how it is now for anyone changing careers or just starting out in the work force: no one’s going to pay you for being a great, competent person who is simply out there looking.  You have to turn over every stone; you have to persevere; you have to remain open and flexible; you have to lower your expectations or be willing to start again at Square 1.  You may be really lucky and land something fairly quickly that proves to be a great fit for both you and your employer or client.   But more than likely, you’ll find you need patience, resourcefulness, and a dogged belief in yourself and your future.  The future isn’t what it used to be; but it’s there.

Thank-you veterans; and thank you, families

This is the day we remember and thank our veterans, for reasons too numerous to count.  Let’s also take a moment to thank their wives, husbands, children and the rest of their family members.  Some of my own memories will illustrate why:

Back in the summer and fall of 1969 and into January of 1970, I was pregnant while my husband, Jack, was overseas in Thailand during the Viet Nam war.   The Viet Nam war was the first one beamed to us via television, and my in-laws, with whom I was living at the time, and I were riveted.  Somehow we managed not to voice our fears to each other, but night after night I watched the images of the fighting and listened to the news reports – one endless reel of videotape, it seemed at the time – and wondered if my baby would have a father.   I was just 20 years old at the time, and only had about 18 months of work done toward a college degree; I tried to envision a future of telling my baby about a father who was gone, but the images never became real.  My mind wouldn’t go there.   So I lived with a kind of low-lying, every-present daily tension.  It was wrapped around unanswered questions, the wait for the mail, the very rare phone call from one of Jack’s buddies who had made it home before him and was calling to see if we were O.K.   We had until June to go; we marked off the days on a calendar, something thousands of other families did, too. We celebrated Christmas by sending care packages overseas, unsure if anything would make it.

Then one day in late January, it was time to go to the hospital – the baby was coming.  We went to the nearest military hospital about 15 miles away in Oakland, Calif.    My mother-in-law, Marge Hubbell, sat with me and bore my fright with her calming presence.  There was a new doctor in the delivery room I’d never met before; my regular doctor wasn’t on shift that day.  The military makes decisions, you adjust.

And then, at last, we were able to greet Miss Diana Lyn Hubbell and say, “Welcome to the world!’  The joy was overwhelming, and I remember being up all night in a kind of euphoria, calling friends all over the country.  But perhaps the most touching moment of all came the next day when, though a combination of kind telephone operators and generous ham radio operators, we managed to get a call all the way across the ocean and to the far northeastern corner of Thailand.  I had to shout, and each operator – I think there were five altogether – had to relay the message to the next operator, until Jack finally got the news that we had a healthy little girl who now had my middle name, as we’d discussed.  The relays back and forth across the ocean took a long time and a lot of shouting, but finally there was one last shout of “I love you!” and the call ended.

And then I heard it – the sound of applause throughout the entire maternity ward.  Military wives were clapping and cheering in support for us; they just clapped and cheered, on and on, for long, warm, sustained minutes.  The show of  support went through to my bones.

- – - – - – -

Fast forward many years later.  Jack and I went on to have a son, John, and later divorced; John was now in the Air Force himself, a 23-year-old developing great leadership skills.  The year was 1996, and I was running my public relations firm in Missoula, Montana, with a staff of four employees.  I don’t remember the day of the week, but I remember the phone call.  It was about 4 p.m. on a summer afternoon, and one of the employees had left work early to run some errands;  he was the one who called.  “Kathy, I don’t know – have you heard the news?  I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

“Well, then, just tell me,” I said.

“A bomb has gone off at an Air Force base in Saudi Arabia.”

“Which one?” I asked.  “There are two.”

“Dhahran.”

“That’s where John is.”

I don’t remember what I said after that.  It must have been something, because I remember hanging up the phone and turning to face the rest of my staff.  But I almost couldn’t talk.  Somehow it was determined that friends in a business across the hall would drive me home; once there, other friends came to sit with me and wait.

I didn’t want to turn on the TV, because I didn’t want those images burned into my brain if they were the last images to be associated with my son.  The bombing was at Khobar Towers, the residential complex for the base.  In my heart, I had two gut-level reactions: the first was “John isn’t dead.”  The second was, “Those kids are so well trained; they’ll get through it.”

Mel and Kathy, the friends who waited with me, kept a low-level conversation going.  I called John’s “first shirt” at his home Air Force base in Utah, but was told they didn’t have much information yet; in fact, he said, CNN would have news about as soon as they would.  Still, I didn’t want to see the images.

So we waited.  Some hours later – not more than three or four, I think – the phone rang and I grabbed it.  “Hi, Mom,” was all John could get out, because I was crying so hard at the sound of his voice.  “Oh, I guess you heard the news,” he finally said.  It turned out that he’d missed the bombing by about five minutes; he’d been driving a truck across the base directly to the towers when the bomb went off.  His job at that moment was to relieve another airman from duty and take him in for more training.  The airman John was to relive was stationed as a lookout on top of Khobar Towers, and had sounded the alarm when he saw something suspicious below.  He survived, too.

John saw and heard the blast, and called in for permission to enter the building and help since the ambulances weren’t there yet.  That’s what he spent the next 18 hours doing; going into that building over and over again, for rescue and recovery operations too difficult – too graphic and too gruesome – to write about here in any detail.  When he and his fellow airmen were finally ordered to stand down because of the building’s instability, John could still hear people screaming inside; all of them could hear the screams, until they finally faded away.

In the next hours, days and weeks, I became glued to CNN – dependent upon CNN – scared to death to watch CNN.  I worried about another bomb.  I worried about post-traumatic stress, something John’s father had gone through for a very long time after returning from Thailand.  I worried about all kinds of attacks for all kinds of reasons.  The image of Khobar Towers, the entire front of the building ripped off, embedded itself in my mind.

Six weeks later, with no further attacks, John returned to his home  base in Utah, and came up to Montana for a visit.  We went up to Glacier National Park, a trip that I’d been planning those six weeks — feeling that all I could do was be sure that John had images of beauty to somehow seep into his soul and soften the edges of the terror.  We took an 11-mile hike from the top of Logan Pass along the Highline Trail,  then over a pass filled with beautiful meadows, to a back country chalet.  From there it was four steep miles downhill back to the “Loop” in Going to the Sun Road, and a hitch back up to the top of the pass to retrieve the car.

I don’t know how much that trip might have helped John; I just know that he was able to talk to the lovely young woman, Angela, who has long since become his wife, and to his sister, and perhaps a little, to me.  A long time later he told me the nightmares had stopped after about a year; he felt lucky for that.

Me?  As with many – perhaps most? -  military wives and mothers in those days, I didn’t know anyone else to talk to who was going through what I was going through – not with Diana’s birth,except for those lovely brief hours in the hospital;  not with the stress that invaded Jack in Thailand, not with John’s narrow escape and descent into hell in Saudi Arabia.  You were expected to cope on your own.  I did, and yet I didn’t: I had my in-laws, and I had the amazing women in that maternity ward, who all understood; I had my good friends Mel and Kathy.  But I didn’t know anyone else who had gone through quite what I’d gone through and understood the constant, daily levels of  fear and tension.

I wonder if those were the years when I developed my habit of working long into the night so that when I went to bed, I would pass out – I wouldn’t have to think.  I wonder how many other wives and mothers now find themselves silently coping in similar ways.

If you know a family with a loved one in the military, remember to thank them, too.  Better yet, reach out with a phone call or a card.

Avoiding 9/11: Remembering too many things too well

A friend and I spent a long time talking this weekend, as we took a quick and welcomed overnight run up to Glacier National Park – our annual September trek.  Neither of us wanted to watch the 9/11 remembrances today; we even avoided going to the church were we have been long-term members.  I tried to turn on TV to watch out of some sense of loyalty, and turned it off again.

It’s too heavy.  We remember too well.

For my part, it renews thoughts that perhaps we could have seen it coming.  Here’s a list of the attacks against the U.S. leading up to 9/11:  List of major Islamic attacks & plots against America

See the listings for 1996?  My son, John, was there at Khobar Towers.  He was driving across the base when the bomb went off, headed to the towers to relieve another airman from duty and take him for further training.  The other airman – who happened to be from Montana, close to where I lived at the time – ended up being the person who sounded the alarm when he looked down from his guard position on the rooftop and saw a truck that didn’t look right.

John got to the towers before any ambulance did, and he radioed his commanding officer requesting permission, which was granted, to enter the building to help.  He spent the next 18 hours helping to pull out bodies and body parts from the site.

I’d received a phone call at work about 4 p.m. that day that a bomb had gone off.  I went home to wait for word, not knowing if my son were dead or alive.  Friends came to wait with me.  I was one of the lucky ones: three or four hours later, the phone rang, and the minute I heard my son’s voice, I burst into tears.  He said, “I can tell you’ve heard the news.”

There were families who waited all night that night for word.

He came home about six weeks later, and we went up to Glacier, where we hiked from the top of Logan Pass, along the Highline Trail, 7.4  miles back over another pass to Granite Park Chalet, then 4 miles almost straight downhill through thick brush to the Loop in Going to the Sun Road.  My theory was that seeing so much stunning beauty might replace or at least co-exist with some of the terrible images now burned into my son’s mind.

I thought about that hike a lot as we got to the top of Logan Pass yesterday, and watched others start out along the Highline Trail.  The beginning of the trail is tough: it’s cut into such a sheer cliff face, and is so narrow, that the Park Service has bolted a garden hose with a chain running through it into the rock, so that you have something to hang on to as you walk that first half mile or so.  It seemed much longer than half a mile at the time, but perhaps it’s not.

That green hose with the chain in it became my security on the first part of that trail; it was just so scary.

You have to look ahead down the trail and prepare.  You have to do a little research.  You have to have the right shoes, carry water, be ready to make noise so that you don’t surprise grizzlies.  There had been several grizzly sightings along the trail in the days just prior to our visit; in fact, just below Granite Park Chalet we passed through an area that was the scene of a renown fatal grizzly attack back in the 1960s, memorialized in the book “The Night of the Grizzlies.”  (I didn’t tell John that part until later.)  I was singing along the trail in a loud voice when we rounded a bend in the brush and came upon a park ranger.  I apologized for sounding kind of strange – and he said “No, you’re doing exactly the right thing.”  You don’t hike silently at Glacier; you make noise.  It’s a safety measure, and if you plan ahead, you’ll be informed of that.

I’ve always wondered if, as a country, we were looking ahead before 9/11/01 – or just reacting.  I’ve wondered that about airport security ever since; we seem to put new measures in place based on past incidents, as if any terrorist would try the same thing twice.  I’m not sure that – even today – we are anticipating very well.  I don’t have inside information, so I could certainly be wrong; but somehow, I still wonder.

In any event, Khobar Towers was itself too heavy then, and is too heavy now.  My son lived; but he now lives with the memory of being told to stand down, that it was no longer safe to enter the building – and hearing the screams of those remaining until the screams faded and were no more.

Ten years ago today, I was helping others across the country to plan a protest against our government’s anthrax vaccine policy  – that of forcing U.S. service members to take this experimental, unproven, highly reactive vaccine against their wishes, when batches of it had already been found to be contaminated or aged or simply unsafe.  I’d traveled to Washington D.C. the year before to witness Congressional hearings, and met many of the young men and women whose health had been permanently ruined by the anthrax vaccine, and whose government did not want to reimburse them for the damages done.  I still run a web site for that issue today – a total of 11 years later, now.

I got up on the morning of 9/11/01 to a phone message that perhaps we should cancel our planned protest in light of what had happened at the Pentagon, and of course immediately went to the TV – and learned of all the events.  I saw the second plane hit the second tower.  I remember thinking, “This isn’t an accident – not twice.”

It’s too heavy.  I still remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when President Kennedy was shot; when Martin Luther King was shot; when Bobby Kennedy was shot.  I don’t know at exactly what point I began to wonder what country I was waking up in each morning.  Perhaps it was after I became aware of the Pentagon conducting medical experiments on our troops – something Congress acknowledged and wrote about clear back in 1994 with something called the Rockefeller Report.  Perhaps it was when I read “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,” about the massacre at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the 1970s, as I tried to understand more about some projects I was working on with Native Americans on reservations in Montana.  I don’t know when I began wondering.

But I can’t stay there.  I have known for years that t would rob me of any last vestiges of sanity.

What do I do for our own future?  One of the things I do is I teach.  As I teach at the university level, I find I am developing a renewed faith in the generations coming up in our country.  They don’t understand everything yet; they simply haven’t lived through enough yet.  But I think there are many, many of them who are trying to figure out what they can do to make the world a better place.  One of the things my colleagues and I try to teach them is strategic thinking and planning; looking forward, scanning the environment, anticipating.

I hope they make it.  I work in the faith and the belief that they will.  I hope they don’t have to wake up wondering exactly what country they are living in, and having to fight through those dark, dark clouds of doubt.

My ancestors came over here in 1732.  They fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Mexican War, World War II, Viet Nam, and the second Gulf War.  There are probably more instances that I haven’t finished researching yet.  I can’t look at all they did and give up on this country.  I can’t look at all that my children and grandchildren and I have been given in this life and say this country isn’t worth it.  It is.

But we do need to re-ignite the dream; we do need to be better at anticipating; we do need to cherish each other and drop the anger.  When I saw hikers on the Highline Trail yesterday, I could only hope that the stunning beauty of Glacier National Park was healing for them as well.

 

 

Thank you, PRSA, for speaking out

As a former board member of the Public Relations Society of America (2008-09), and having been involved with PRSA for over 20 years, I am thrilled to see the rebuttal to Jack O’Dwyer from last Friday:     http://media.prsa.org/article_display.cfm?article_id=2181  and to see the rebuttal quoted in both Ad Age:   http://adage.com/article/agency-news/pr-group-accuses-writer-phone-hacking/228801/    and Ragan’s PR Daily:   http://prdaily.com/Main/Articles/8965.aspx      .  The beginning of PRSA’s rebuttal reads thus:

“Mr. O’Dwyer, while a free press is essential to our country, principles and profession, not everything—or everyone—wrapped in the mantle of “journalism” is right or ethical, as the News of the World scandal demonstrates. But then again, it would appear that your organization condones such practices, given that records from our teleconferencing vendor show that telephone numbers registered to the J.R. O’Dwyer Company connected to PRSA teleconference calls without PRSA’s permission five times between May 22, 2007, and May 12, 2009.

“You’ve now repeated the lie that PRSA’s auditors “quit” so often that you’ve clearly come to believe it’s true. Yet, when Gary McCormick and Bill Murray met with you last Spring, they answered this allegation. They explained to you that PRSA routinely seeks competitive bids for professional services, including audit services, to manage costs. They also explained that it’s common for organizations to change auditors periodically as a way of maintaining the auditor’s independence.“

I well remember some of those phone calls.  We were asked several times if we knew of someone who was on the call but had not announced themselves; we were told that it was suspected that someone might have leaked information about confidential board discussions.  I don’t know that the latter ever actually happened — but it should come as no surprise to anyone that sometimes boards need to be able to discuss things in private.  Board members need to be free to examine any number of angles to any given topic or issue put in front of them.  Certainly personnel discussions have to be private, by law.   I had then, and still have now,  tremendous respect and admiration for my fellow board members. I didn’t suspect anyone, and didn’t want to have to suspect anyone.  Apparently – allegedly – it might have been Mr. O’Dwyer all along, a man (just using the generic term here) with a life-long compulsion to tear down PRSA.

Before I even took my position on the board, he called me to ask if I really knew what I was doing.  Later, he wrote that I must be more involved in advertising than public relations, because the name of my company was AdScripts – and that’s all he knew about my company.  He never asked me, nor did he do any homework, to find out that I’ve long specialized in public relations (and now teach it) but just never bothered to change the name of my company because it was too entrenched.

I was far from the only person contacted.    PRSA has kept a dignified silence about many of O’Dwyer’s activities, preferring to work behind the scenes to try to resolve things.

There is no resolving them.  We are simply dealing with someone who holds a lifetime grudge and makes money by doing so.  He is not the first person to make money in this way, but he certainly adds a whole new level of sleaze to the deal.

I’m glad that I’m no longer on the board in this instance, because it feels lovely to feel free to speak out in greater defense of PRSA.  Mr. O’Dwyer, you pander to the lowest levels of human thought and behavior; PRSA, on the other hand, not only follows the rules – as required by law – but works to bring out and develop the best in the 22,000 professionals it serves.   Quite a difference in focus, I’d say.

News you can choose: or news that expands your world?

I love this column by Daniel Akst -  in today’s Oregonian, headlined “Switch channels, just once a week,” but here on a Republican American site (which took a lot of digging, since Newsday, where Akst is a columnist, wants registration and subscription information and I just can’t bring myself to subscribe to one more thing) headlined “Test your leanings; get 2nd opinion.” 

Here’s an excerpt:

“…now that left and right are once again at full strength on cable, there’s still one thing to wish for: that at least once a week, the two sides would trade audiences.  I say this because for a while now it’s been so each for each of us to live inside an echo chamber, insulated from anything but our own convictions and preconceptions… Instead of just sorting themselves into ideological ghettos, Americans are doing the same thing residentially.  It’s a sad fact, to embrace each side’s caricature of the other, that your Birkenstock-wearing, latte-swilling liberals increasingly huddle together in like-minded communities, just as your gun-toting, Bible-thumping conservative are doing... The Internet is making it even easier to protect ourselves from inconvenient facts or opinions.”

In my classes and training workshops, I’ve always recommended reading media on the far right, the far left, and everything in between, because somewhere in there is a balance.  But when you add to that the fact that if something is repeated often enough, people believe it – then there are times when trying to get the truth to shine through all the clutter is difficult indeed.

How can we produce new generations who are committed to learning, exploring and expanding their worlds?  Who are willing to move out of their comfort zones?  Whose parents and teachers hold up a much larger view of the world than their favorite TV channels or online entertainment sources might provide?

I would love any feedback.

 

Thank you, Emanuel – over 200 years later

Emanuel and Sophia Deyer  This picture is too large to insert all the way into a post here, but if you click on it, you’ll see Emanuel Deyer and his wife, Sophia.  Emanuel was the third generation of my father’s family in this country: he was the son of John Dyer, and the grandson of Hans Georg Dyer (originally spelled Dirr) who sailed to Philadelphia on the good ship Dragon from the Palatine section of what is now Germany on Sept. 30, 1732.

The family settled in and around Manheim, Pennsylvania – traditional Pennsylvania Dutch country, and I heard lots of those stories growing up.

I had long assumed our ancestors must be farmers or in some way connected with agriculture, but on a trip nearly a decade ago back to Manheim to search for my roots, I found out differently.  Most of them seemed to be in business of one kind of another; a hardware store still running in Manheim today, Longenecker’s, was originally founded by Jacob and John Dyer in 1857.  They would have been Emanuel’s grandsons.

Many generations of our family have  fought in the wars of this country.  Emanuel is especially remembered on a memorial plaque outside St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in Manheim. as a veteran of the Revolutionary War.  Born in 1760, he would have been a mere 16 years old at the beginning of the war.  Memorial plaque

If you look closely on this plaque, you’ll see his name at the bottom, centered.  If you keep looking, you’ll see Sophia’s name and their daughter Elizabeth’s name as well.  There is a Jacob Deyer, too, and we wonder if he was the infant they lost.

Why do I write about Emanuel today?  Because he and so many who served with him – and the generations since – are in some danger of being forgotten.  Emanuel is buried somewhere behind the church, in a graveyard that, in 1948 or so, got paved over into a parking lot.  His tombstone, along with Sophia’s and Elizabeth’s and several others, leans against a wall in the basement of the church.  Tombstones in the church basement

I am long remiss in not re-contacting the church to find out if something can be done.  But for now, I can write; for now, I can help us all remember.

Our generations included people who fought on both sides in the Civil War; in the Mexican-American War; in World War II; in the Viet Nam War, serving in Thailand; and in the Gulf, twice.  We are incredibly lucky that we do not seem to have lost many of our family members in war; we are incredibly lucky that some of our forebears took the time to preserve the chronology, the drawings, the photographs, and some letters and legal documents.  I always thought it was the luck of the draw that I happened to be born in the U.S.A., with a degree of freedom that I may not have known anyplace else.

Looking at the list of ancestors, I no longer think it was luck.  I think they worked their tails off to ensure that what my family so enjoys today will continue for centuries to come.

So thank you, Emanuel.  You were one of the first.  You made a difference, and we will remember.

Graduations

Nearly a month of celebrations: that’s what this year’s graduation season holds for me.  Last month, I went back to Missoula (Montana) for the University of Montana’s graduation – one of the only chances I get to meet some of my online students in person.  It was wonderful to see them start on the next stages of their lives, full of joy at having made it through and gotten their degrees.  Commencement speaker was Tom Brokaw, a beloved figure in Montana as a part-time resident there.  He warned the students that they weren’t graduating into real life, the way everyone says; real life was back in junior high.  People still act with the same petty jealousies and power plays out there.  I had to laugh – and wonder if any of us ever truly change!

My good friend Michael Brown, Jr., who has headed up the Virginia Peninsula Chapter of PRSA this past year, received his doctorate from Old Dominion University just before that, and Mara Woloshin and I – who have worked with him on his APR studies – sent him many warm congratulations!

Today, I’m headed out to the Oregon Coast, but with a stopover at my cousin Christie’s house in Lake Oswego to help celebrate her daughter, Kaitlyn’s, graduation from high school.  I think Kaitlyn has just landed a scholarship to the university of her choice back east, to study performing arts; I can’t wait to find out more!  She’s an amazing young woman.

Tomorrow I head to Eugene, where my good friend Cary Greenwood is getting her doctorate at the University of Oregon; and then Friday, I’ll be back here in the Portland metro area to take part as a faculty member in the Marylhurst University graduation ceremonies, where several of my students are graduating.  Just after those ceremonies, my young next-door neighbor, David – who lawn-mowing abilities I will sorely miss – is celebrating his graduation from high school, and I know he’s headed for success in his life.

I love these times of celebration, although I mentioned to someone last year that attending a graduation as a faculty member is very nearly as bad as having your kids leave home in terms of its bittersweet taste.  “Bye!” say the students.  “Thanks for everything!”  — and I mope around thinking, “But I worked with you really hard, and I’ve learned to care a lot about you and your success – you’ll stay in touch, won’t you?”  Well, some do and some don’t.  It is kind of like having your kids leave home; at first, they just want to fly and test their wings.  It’s only much later – sometimes once they’ve had their own kids – that they begin to feel that double-edged lance of success and loss.

But it’s all good.  It’s the way life should be.  And as I head out today,  I’m just filled with joy for my wonderful friends, neighbor and family member and all they’ve accomplished.  Moving forward, moving on – with sails into the wind.

Whew … I knew there was a problem, but this is something else.

I’ve hammered my online students about their grammar, spelling and punctuation to the point that I’m sure they’d want to throw spitballs if we were in the same room together.

This book review and the author’s responses – http://bit.ly/hAwofG -  make me cringe.  This poor misguided author self-published her book and apparently waited for the accolades to roll in.  What she got instead was a reviewer  speaking the truth and asking her to face reality, which she seems either unable or unwilling to do.  She still swears by the quality of her writing.  The fact that her many e-mails in outraged response to the reviewer display even more typos and even more examples of bad grammar and bad writing just compound her original errors.  I end up wondering why on earth she would subject herself to such humiliation rather than crawl back into her home, work on her writing skills for a few years, then try again.

I’ve always thought that to write is to open a vein in your arm and let it bleed – in public.  You have to be ready, and brave; you must have something so finely crafted that even if people don’t really like it, at least they can’t tear it apart based on the most fundamental aspects of sentence structure and clarity.

I’m very gratified to read some of the responses to this author; certainly there are still people out there who care about the language.

Australia, Egypt, and Bear

It’s about 7 am on Sunday morning, Feb. 13, and Bear – my Belgian Shepherd – and I are quietly ensconced in the den.  Bear is dozing, glad to be home after his hip replacement surgery two days ago, and I suspect equally glad for the morning’s dose of pain medication that he got just a little while ago.

I am reflecting on the events of the past five weeks or so.  On January 6th I flew to Australia to visit an old  friend from high school days, now retired in Coffs Harbour – about a seven-hour drive north of Sydney on the same coast, or a one-hour plane hop.  Sue and her partner, Trish, are both retired high school principals, and I knew they’d have no problems with the fact that I had to do some online teaching while I was there.

At the edge of the Dorrigo Rain Forest, New South Wales

For most of the first week, it rained.  The weather was part of the same storm system that was then inundating the state of Queensland, a good ways to the north of us.  Each night we watched the heartbreaking scenes on the evening news.  People lost their homes, their livelihoods, and in some cases, beloved family members or friends.

And yet, night after night, when reporters interviewed these people, there was not a word of complaint.  The general attitude was, “We’ll have to just pick up and go on.  We’ll get through this, somehow.”

No one whined; it turns out that the Australians hate whiners.  That lack of complaint and the displays of Australian toughness and resilience were impressive enough just as they were.  But the other thing I noticed was the use of the word “we.”  Australians feels they are all part of their country; nowhere did I notice a sense of “me.”  It was nearly always “we.”

That sense of “we” was never more evident than what happened immediately during and after the Queensland flooding.  Suddenly there were donation boxes and cans everywhere in Coffs Harbour, and – I was soon to find – in Sydney, where I finished up the last two days of the trip.  I’m sure those donation cans and boxes showed up throughout the continent, although in Perth wildfires had already started and those emergencies began to take precedence.

The harbor at Coffs Harbour - a beautiful coastal resort community

There were several other things I noticed about Australians.  They are open, friendly, and laid-back people and they seem, at least from my cursory two-week glance, to be a people without the cynicism and anger that seems to have spread like a virus here in the U.S.  That being said, they still have their share of problems.  I started reading the “Sydney Morning Herald” before my trip, and find that I still check the online edition every other day or so.  There are the usual crimes one would expect in a large city, and they are not immune to difficulties with politicians, economic problems, and other issues.  Still, I kept noticing how much Australians reach out to help each other with even the smallest of things: carrying groceries out of a store, picking up something that’s fallen, giving assistance to someone trying to manage a baby carriage.  The cheery phrase, “No worries, mate” was something I heard often.

I also picked up on some startling differences in the media.  I happen to subscribe to “Reader’s Digest,” an old addiction from childhood, and my friends had the Australian edition in their home.  I was startled to find the Australian edition full of positive, uplifting stories while the American edition was full of more fear-laden “Can this happen to you?” types of articles.  I think I need to speak to the editors about that…

View of Sydney Opera House from the zoo ferry

The newspapers were different as well.  I brought back a copy of the Coffs Harbour “Advocate,” because I was laughing so hard at the headlines, full of puns and plays on words.  People were pumped up about a new sewer line; a local construction firm felt hammered – and more.  Turns out the Australian love of words is evident nearly everywhere – from verbal rhymes which seemingly make no sense to the outsider, to puns in headlines.  There is a playfulness in all of it that is delightful.

I got home to the U.S. on January 22nd, after two weeks which gave me the mental rejuvenation – the hard “re-boot” – that I’d needed for several months.  Just a few days later, protests began in Egypt, and the world watched – and waited.  I discovered the tweets of Egyptian journalist Sarah El Sirgany, and told my students to follow the events online.  It readily became apparent that civilian Egyptians were carrying out security checks for anyone wanting to enter Tahrir Square – they didn’t want any firearms or any violence.  Later, I wrote on my Facebook page that  I cannot remember another time in my life when an entire nation – unable to vote – brought about revolution by peaceful means. Incredible self-restraint among the Egyptian people; incredible persistence until voices were heard.

Bear - sleeping off some pain meds

This morning, Bear and I slowly went out to get the morning paper.  He is limping heavily, of course, and I have a sling for his hind quarters to help support him and get him up and down the back ramp and over some rough spots.  Once we were back inside, I indulged in my favorite Sunday morning pastime: reading the funnies and “Parade” magazine before getting to the hard news of the day.  I checked in with Doonesbury – another 30-year-old habit – and there found that Gary Trudeau had hit the nail on the head yet again: ‘What are we like as a people?  Well, let’s look at two sets of facts…nine years ago, we were attacked.  3,000 people died.  In response, we started two long, bloody wars and build a vast homeland security apparatus – all at a cost of trillions! Now, consider this. During those same nine years, 270,000 Americans were killed by gunfire at home.  Our response?  We weakened our gun laws.”

Consider that. 

I wonder how my own beloved country can finally cast off fear, cynicism and anger, and begin to disarm ourselves, as private individuals, voluntarily – so that we get our sense of “we” back, and do not always feel the need to be protected from each other.  We have such a wonderful history of being an open, hospitable, friendly people.  Surely we can regain our American optimism and American “can do” spirit once again.   I’m spending the next eight weeks helping Bear to heal; I’m wondering what it will take for our amazing country to heal as well.