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Good Letters

20111103-i-am-the-99-by-david-griffithEvery Monday through Friday morning, the whole family (my wife, eighteen-month-old son, five-year-old daughter, and myself), pile into our Saturn and drive the three miles to drop off our daughter at school. (The drive takes exactly seven minutes.)

The Saturn needs work that we can’t really afford to have done right now, and so there’s an anxious moment when my wife turns the key in the ignition. Will today be the day that it finally quits on us?

Then my wife turns around, retraces our route, and drops me off at my office—another seven minutes—which is inside a beautiful old brick classroom building.

I love my office. It’s the best office I’ve ever had; actually, it’s the only office I’ve ever had, and it’s beyond messy. The messiness is an embodiment of my rangy to-do lists. Just last night at an All-Saints feast, a student commenting on the state of my office said that she feared that something would emerge from the stacks of books and papers and eat her.

I could walk to work—we live just on the edge of the campus where I am a professor in a house owned by the College—but these days every minute seems precious. If I’m going to finish my book, make substantive comments on thirty student essays, write a grant to fund the writing of my book, organize a field trip to Washington D.C. for my students to see Joan Didion, write a blog post, update my blog, reply to a dozen emails, and plan the summer program I direct, then I feel like I can’t waste a second of my day.

I’m typing these words on a peripheral monitor that is connected to my laptop so that I can work on more than one document at a time—I currently have seven Word documents minimized in the dock at the bottom of the screen. The laptop has my notes and iTunes playlist featuring John Coltrane, and the monitor displays the documents in progress.

This looks and feels efficient to me, but really it’s overwhelming. Most days I feel like Sisyphus trying to push several bowling balls up a hill at once to the tune of “Giant Steps.”

Despite the fact that I will routinely work a sixty-hour week, and still not have made any progress on my book, I love what I do. I say a prayer of thanksgiving every night before sleep for this job, the house we live in, and the gifts and talents we have been given.

I am feeling more thankful, but also more cranky, than usual these days. Every morning when I come into my office, I browse the latest postings to the Tumblr blog “We are the 99%,”  a forum where people from all over the country post photos of themselves holding up handwritten (sometimes typed) notes describing their often desperate financial situations. All of the notes end with “I am the 99%,” one of the rallying cries of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The testimonials are often heartbreaking. Not surprisingly, the most distressing stories involve chronic illness, no health insurance, or not very good insurance, and astronomical medical bills.

The next most distressing involve young people who have gone into debt to attend college, and are now either unemployed or so under-employed that they cannot afford to pay their bills. Many of them say they are working multiple jobs, but still live paycheck to paycheck. “I don’t know where I’ll be in 4-5 years,” one young woman working three jobs writes in bold, black marker on lined notebook paper.

It costs $40,000 a year to go to the school where I teach. It costs nearly $50,000 to go to my alma mater—it was $20,000 when I graduated thirteen years ago.

Working at a small liberal arts college, usually thought of as a refuge for students who want a well-rounded education that will help them to become life-long learners (people who understand the pursuit of knowledge to be a virtue), I have noticed a shift in how the students regard college. The Socratic method makes them impatient; they want to know what’s on the test and what’s not. “So, all we have to do is…” begins many of the questions students ask me.

It seems that the great recession we are enduring is changing how we imagine the cost-benefit of a degree, and causing young people to either check their big dreams at the door, or to assiduously plan the journey to achieve that dream. There’s just no room for error anymore.

I feel it, too. Over the last decade fewer students are choosing the kind of college where I work. Salaries are down—way down. Benefits have been cut. Our insurance isn’t as good as it was when we first got married. We’re still paying off my wife’s surgery from almost two years ago.

There’s sense that we should all be chipping in, doing more with less, but the reality is that we’re doing more for less.

That said, I feel like I’m on the lucky end of the 99%. I’m able to support my family on the salary I make, though just barely. But like many of the people who post to the “We are the 99% blog,” my family is one medical issue, car wreck, or even just a really cold winter away (we have an oil furnace) from depleting our savings and maxing-out our credit card. As one poster to the blog wrote, “What is bad luck for one could ruin the lives of others.”

And so there mornings now that when I unlock the door to my office, step over the piles of books and stacks of papers to be graded, I actually regret the decision to become an artist.

On these mornings, it takes a lot of prayer and John Coltrane to keep me from dwelling on the fact that, technically, I lost money during the two hours I spent writing this.

If this keeps up, perhaps it won’t be long before we have whole generations who regard art as a waste of time.

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