When I was a kid, and saw American college campuses on TV, I thought it was the coolest thing. Sunshine-y, casual, and political. I badly wanted to be there. Now I’m not sure how much of that image remains. It is sunny in California, tho, and there sure are flashes of burning political questions in and outside of class.
A friend of mine in Sweden said that at the end of the school year, if she saw a person in their early 20s anywhere (in the supermarket, in the street) she’d turn around and walk in the other direction. Not every 20-year-old was a student of hers, of course, but she felt as if every 20-year-old wanted something from her. And she had had enough.
I feel the same way right now. I’m not so sensitive to age, tho. And I can deal with people in short spells. But beyond that, 20 years old or 60, I will have had enough of you pretty fast.
(You know I’m joking, I love people!)
Every time I walk down the long and winding staircase at work I’m afraid I’ll fall and break my neck. I wasn’t really close to having that happen today, but as I descended the stairs the hem of my skirt got caught on my clog and a seam split open. The downstairs lobby was full of what looked like prospective students and their parents, but I didn’t see that until I had already let out a fully audible F***! So I went upstairs again, stapled my skirt together, and took the little back staircase down to class.
I watched Swedish literary talk show ‘Babel‘ the other day. Host Jessika Gedin was interviewing Kristian Gidlund, who has written a book, and a blog, about fighting stomach cancer. Gedin prefaced the interview by saying that several people had suggested she’d read Gidlund’s book, but that she’d been hesitant to do so until Gidlund was going to be a guest on the show (and she had no choice).
We have to assume that it was fear that kept Gedin from reading a book written by a 29-year-old cancer patient.
I told my Intro to Media Studies class this story as an example of what happens when we avoid topics that we perceive to be ‘sensitive’: We exclude experiences, and people, who have the right to be heard, and from whom we probably have something to learn.
One of my students agreed vehemently. “Books like that are supposed to be inspirational”, he said. “It’s wrong to avoid them”.
When I told him that Gidlund is dying, and that he said in the interview that he doesn’t expect to make it much past summer, my student’s face changed. He hadn’t thought about that, that cancer actually can kill you. He didn’t think of that because so much of the cancer rhetoric is concentrated on the fight, the heroes, the survivors, the inspirational stories.
Gedin introduced Gidlund by talking about the shift in his life when he went from being a touring musician to a cancer patient. “Plans for the future were replaced by cancer treatments”, she said.
When you are diagnosed with cancer treatments are your plans for the future. And, given the circumstances, they seem to be pretty good plans too. At least to you. It was irritating to me to watch an interview where the interviewer proved herself to be incapable of appreciating that her perspective is a perspective, not the truth. Instead she kept using her perspective, the outsider’s perspective, to ‘explain’ the experience of her cancer patient guest.
I suspect she hadn’t read the book after all.