Ongoing tension between the students and the professor in a Sociology class I took resulted in a stand, "there's the line - I've drawn it - pick your side" scenario and I found this particular post in our class's online forum interesting enough to post publicly. For a time, the professor would badger on about certain things he seemed to have strong opinion about, and when presented with an argument or an opposing question he would never prove his point. This consistency made me question how viable his "expertise" really was, naturally. I mean, you really had to hear this guy talk.
While it doesn't matter whose side I'm on, it was very refreshing to see our professor actually stick up for himself. Proving a stronger point in fewer words.
Class interested me after that.
What do you think?:
Author: Michael L Ewing Posted on: 7-27-10
"choose for yourself.
Our sociology class is in a state of 'becoming' a clear reflection of the pessimistic world around us, that we dont have to embrace. You dont think so, take a look. Anyone but me get tired of reading your articles and seeing the next unmotivating shift in the mankind movement? This is not an aim at the professor, its the mentality of what we're fed in class; a microscopic pessimistic way to look at the face of our own future and think thats the currents of our hope for tomorrow. Stand up for yourself! I read your articles: Gunman kills 17, Mel Gibson controversy, Racism, national corruption, even animals are people too! I listened in class with you: Beaten wives, racial oppression, single moms, homosexual casuality, liberalis, 196,000 years of chaotic disorder. So hopeful?!? Do we not have a backbone, should we just fall to the currents of our generation and die with them downstream where they are going?
hundreds of years ago our country had a birth that caught the eyes of its sibling nations all over the world, because we stood up as people in a voice making a declaration that we were going to stand for something that hadn't been stood for like it. Not that we were perfection, because even at the time the women who birthed our forefathers had minimal 'equal' rights, and we massacred indians whose land it was, but our vision was a becoming one. Without a vision people perish. Our globe knew really well prior to our declaration the taste of rising and falling eras, post-biblical and midevil, nation standing with nation, genocide, Industrialization growth, people advanced, kings rose.. Kings fell. Power shifts, weakness becomes strength, and so on, like individuals. every individual. A season to rise, a season to fall. A season of noise, a season of peace. A time for all things. And so goes the cyclic story of nations, but 'people' make up nations.
And in that great opportunity to have a story to live for, we as a people put our foot forward. In Birmingham, we put our foot forward against what we, black and white alike now, knew to be against our moral convictions to the point of death if need be. At Washingtons crossing in the great keystone state of Pennsylvania, high on the hill, our forces spotted the british coming and we opposed it, we stood for hope in the face of a heavy opposition but victory we sought, and we found so that we could hold on to the vision passed to us. We have and are a part of a bigger legacy. A former mentor of mine said its necessary not to trade in the things you want at the moment, for what you want in the end. Sacrifice and vision have always been an element that spilled the blood for the freedom we have, because it always take blood to be shed to be given certain inheritable freedoms.
I sit in class quiet, as you are, listening to the forced washing of hopelessness. I refuse it. Sure my spirit is shot at with the darts of opposition, because i know statistically that i am a part of some of those statistics, and that the same evils that make those statistics alive many of the people in class are desiring to get back to when we are finished. Dont believe the misconception that i am against the people who partake, but the evil itself: The love for drunkenness more then having a vision, the love for immorality more than sacrifice, the love for the slavery we put ourselves into like chaotic relationships and violence and oppression, more then we love freedom. Using our mouths for grave digging and not life building. Since when is homosexuality natural if we all came from a mother and father. Since when did we come from monkeys, if we have never found a skeleton of a half human half creature.
Don't be dilted with falsity, stand up for truth and purpose. You are not people without a purpose, all the while you were the arm, the legs, the fingers of a greater movement. The eye sees, the ears hear, the feet walk..Each was set apart that we would function to raise up mankind in motion, dont you see it, to raise up our spirits to flee from the things that bring cancer to our lives. God made order, a very specific order..not a set of rules to follow or religiosity but a path that would walk us with vision, peace and order.. To avoid the things we post in our current events and talk about in class so that we're not numb to the anesthetic they want to 'inject into the veins of our civilization', as Martin Luther said years ago.
If you take from the body its muscular system, it does not stand. If you take from the body its respiratory system, it does not breathe. Without a respiratory system, there is no circulatory system. Without one, there is none. "Order". So what happens to a people who as the book of judges says 'everyone did as he saw fit', they perish morally and spiritually. Strength is in unity and when a people divide from the common body system to follow their own desires and do as they see fit, we corrode in the form of hopelessness, violence, divorce, homosexuality, polygamy, mutilation, racism, poverty, sound like class? In a loud voice the lord once shouted "i am not willing that anyone should perish..you are my desired ones...i lay before you life and death..choose for yourself, me" And because we are a body functioning for the greater body, in what way could we all be on the same plane and still have different functions if not for the head, which is God? "
And in an instance of difference:
Author: Steven L Stoll Posted on: 7-27-10
"oh my...are we in church or college Michael? I think we're in college and we are here to learn how the world really is, and to explore scientific evidence, not opinion and superstition. I'm sorry if our discussion disappoints you or "depresses" you. You can reject the truth and bury yourself in any beliefs you desire, but we will continue to explore human society as it really is.
Sorry to have made you so unhappy,
Prof. Stoll"
ZING!
The day after Professor Stoll was taking roll; When he got to Michael's name, who was in class, Michael said nothing - I'm pretty sure he just wasn't paying attention, or didn't hear him, because he was intently going over notes and reading ( I sat next to him in class) - but when Michael didn't say "here" Professor Stoll chuckled to himself and said, "Chicken?"
POW!
This rose my brow. And I laughed inside.
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