October 10th, 2017

When I’m On Campus….

When I’m on campus, I think everything is possible.  It’s energizing.  I know many college campus venues have become a safe spaces for stupid ideas, but I love the campus of the University of Georgia. But the culture of offense and the attack of institutions of learning is real. When Alan Dershowitz is challenged on his ability to speak at Berkeley, there’s a problem. I’ll get off my soap box, but ideas and discussion is not what we should be afraid of.  We should be afraid of the culture of being offended.

Many years ago, my friend, Alan Colmes–who was one of the nicest and most successful liberal talk hosts in the business–and I were talking about why there’s such an imbalance in the number of liberal shows to the number of conservative shows on radio. At that time it was about 400 liberal shows to about 4400 conservative shows. What he said was and still is insightful.  He said, “Martha, we don’t have a sense of humor. We can’t laugh at ourselves and when you are bashing capitalism, it’s hard to get advertisers.” It is a business. But I loved the business and one of the great blessings of my life was the time I spend on radio.

Back to the midterm week.  I’m really trying to avoid it.  I worked on my math midterm from 5:30 am until 10 pm yesterday. It’s not the math, it’s really not.  It’s the d(*& LaTeX and R Code I have to use to type my homework.  I know I’m a social scientist and I have to have this knowledge if I’m going to publish papers.  I really see the value of the creations of graphs, etc and I can see a sliver–just a sliver of light–at the end of the tunnel of this despair that is R Code.  But only a sliver.

I don’t know if I’ll make it through.  Depending on what I do with the midterm, will decide if I drop the class and start over next year.  And there are other loose ends related to my education I need to tie up. But I will survive and even if it takes me until the State of Georgia lets me go for free (age 62), I will finish, d#$%^&*!