PRESIDENT'S CORNER: June 30, 2017

Independence Day! Snap, crackle, pop…BOOM! Next Tuesday is the 4^th of July and my 48^th wedding anniversary. We thought it would be great to always have a holiday and fireworks to celebrate our life together. Thank God we still like each other, yes? When the 4^th would fall on the weekend, we used to enjoy going to D.C. to see the fireworks on the mall, until we got there one year and the humidity and heat was hellish…no more of that! Anyway…Do have a safe and sane 4^th and celebrate our nation’s birth with a bang.

Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance: I just finished this terrific book. Remember last week I said I would continue this column but it would likely change spots? Well, this book gave me a lot to think about. I wonder why it has not been chosen as one of WVU’s “Campus Read” choices? It deals with exactly the kind of kids that come to us here from all over Appalachia. It made a personal impact on me for the following reasons: 1) I am not a Hillbilly, but I was born in Oklahoma, as was Elizabeth Warren, from similar parents; 2) Vance singles out Oklahoma, along with Utah and Massachusetts, as places that you might expect hillbillies to come from but don’t; 3) I, like Warren, benefitted from exactly the same elements of nearly free public education, college and grad school and nurturing teachers and church friends that encouraged me to learn and not get stuck in the past; 4) I spent 5 years as a social worker in Los Angeles and Washington state, trying to help the very people that Vance writes about. I increasingly worried about how our society was failing these people (as I still worry). Vance does not think vast new social programs would likely save hill people from themselves, but he does conclude that kids that have a network of friends, family, teachers and spiritual support are more likely to succeed in life…and that college is not the answer for everyone.

I know that our hearts bleed for all those people in WV that keep hoping for the coal industry or many other manufacturing jobs to bounce back…but they won’t. I wonder when our government will figure out that we need to find solutions to what comes next rather than trying to resurrect jobs that no longer exist?

“They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.” [Alexis de Tocqueville…from David Brooks’ column on the lack of republican vision for the USA}

And now for something patriotic for the 4^th:

In This Land by John Hardison (2015)

In this land there is a mighty voice that can
sing a mighty song.

Often it is a song of I don’t belong and all sort
of other things that are wrong.

This mighty voice can herald itself in the
grateful praise of being strong.

All while asking what else is to be spawn in a
struggle to do no wrong.

Should it be we shall live in all eternal
knowing wrong being strong.

It is God’s place to be so strong and
to know all wrong.

So it is in praise to him we should kneel as we
spawn our grateful song.

There is one more thing in his Love
eternal song

We all belong.

***

Jim Held, President