Reconnecting

I HAVE MORE THAN THREE THOUSAND friends on Facebook, nearly all of them former students of mine who kindly reconnected with me online. I am flattered, and a bit overwhelmed, and greatly grateful for the attention. For the most part, they seem to be doing well, and it shocks me to realize how many of them are now, how long it has been since many of them were in my classes, a reminder of my thirty five years in the teaching profession, mostly high school and college. My mother used to say that she had no difficulty comprehending her own age, but could not believe how old her children were. now, I fully understand. so many of them have gone onto successful careers and family lives, and so many of them generously give me credit for having inspired and even been a primary source of their success, that I am compelled to remind them of what little I did, and how much they have done. I find it difficult to remain appropriately humble amid all the sincere flattery. I succeed. Again, its appropriate. my feeling of satisfaction, I hope is also appropriate. One student in particular, however, dismays me, concerning his pathway beyond graduation. I remember him well, and had lost track of him, like most of the others, until Facebook brought us back together. he was in one of my Western Civilization classes at a major university, and was a most promising student. He aced my class, which seemed too easy for him. he aspired to a career as a writer, and to that end went on to obtain a masters of fine arts degree from an Ivy League school. This in itself was a risky career choice: deciding to become a successful creative writer is like deciding to become a rock star: it is an ambition best pursued in one's free time from the security of one's basement, while pursuing a more tangibly lucrative career, like teaching, law, or accounting. No matter how talented you are, you never know whether the world will appreciate your talent, and pay you for it. But he had a dream, and he went for it. He never completed his first novel, never pursued another career, and we left to take on off jobs and temporary employment, and to rely on the beneficence of his parents, while he languished through his twenties, unpublished and underfed. At some point, about the time he reached the age of thirty, he evidently lost faith in the real world, and decided to retreat into one of his own manufacture, and to remain there, to this day. it stated when he became a votary of someone called "Ramtha the Enlightened one", about 1985. Ramtha was, and still is, a woman who channels the spirit of an ancient philosopher warrior from ancient India, and gives lectures, seminars, and consultations, at at great profit. The guru cult industry is quite lucrative in America, attracting hordes of lost souls, and their financial support. From there my former students life continued ever more deeply into the realm of alternative universes of reality, eventually encompassing contacts with various extraterrestrial species, journey into parallel universes and dimensions, and an endless outpouring, by him, of information about intelligent beings living within the hollow Earth, on mars, and intermingling among human society, unseen by anyone other than himself and others of his kind. Of course, conspiracy theories are part and parcel, the stranger the better. Many of them involve unseen organizations determined to enslave us all and to control the global economy, consortium of mysterious trillionaires and extraterrestrial operatives. My troubled friend is heavily involve in all this to this day; he tells me all about it, when he isn't out delivering pizzas.I now know that man has never landed on the mon, that vaccinations are a form of insidious government sponsored mind control, and that only President Trump, whom he adores, can possible save us from all this. I find it interesting that people who have left the realm of reality through alienation form a large part of support for president Trump, who himself surrounds himself with an aura of the unreal, of living in an alternative unreal universe, by constantly fabricating fantastic imaginary facts, and feeling them to his uncritical sycophants, yearning for meaning and purpose in a world they angrily feel has abandoned them. Alarmingly, there are millions of people like my poor former student, all seeking something unknown to themselves. I'll stay in touch,and try to help, knowing that he sees no need to be helped. I cannot possible enable his fantasy by explicitly agreeing with his notions. I can, however, let him know that while I do not share his world view, i support without reservation his right to have one, and that, after all, we all share what Einstein called "our weak and transitory comprehension of reality."