after 9 hours of work with no food or water, i went to an information session presented by william eaton. bill, the new ambassador in residence at UT, was the former ambassador to panama. which i’m sure most people already knew. but recall, i live under a rock and work in an office with no windows.
most of his presentation was anecdotal. he shared stories about his years working for the foreign services in the department of state. my eyes started to droop after an hour, but out of respect, i stayed to listen and watch. carefully.
while interesting to listen to, and clearly enthusiastic about his chosen career, i am hesitant to listen to a man that chuckles at his own audacity, having provoked the kgb while on assignment in russia. i suppose every man is granted his irreverent younger years. but there’s defiant, and then there’s stupid arrogance. i assume he’s now a seasoned veteran with all the usual trappings of a mature middle-aged white man who has acquired decades of socialization and training from the government. mmm, my favorite american demographic. i’m sure he’s done a lot of positive things in his life, but while ambassadors out of the country are concerned with the opinions of foreign interests, they have failed to properly prepare most of my generation. the so-called generation y, highly intelligent and capable, yet coddled and mysteriously quiet. we are most delicate. we are dangerous because we are next in line to grab the ropes of this wayward raft. and i assure you that we are just as capable, and even more likely than our boomers, to run this shit straight into the rocks. big expensive bright yellow SUVs that wreck things and ponder on the smoldering ashes. juggernauts of idiocy. and i’m talking about the smart, reasonably-educated ones. the rest are almost harmless.
i’m from the generation whose parents forbade red ink to be used to grade our work because of its harmful impact on our self-esteem… ?!… for ritalin’s sake, people. i hardly know anyone within a ten year radius of me that can cope with high stress and conflict without pharmaceutical or chemical assistance. hell, make it a twenty year radius with the imperious rise of the laboratory-created superdrugs that prevent normal feeling and thinking.
i threw my flag when mr. eaton explained that there is no minimum educational requirement to work in his field. but you have to be an actively attending student to qualify for the internship. and it’s highly competitive. but one of his colleagues is working three steps down from the top with a GED. i don’t even have sarcastic remarks for that shit. inconsistent messages to college students and the american public. obviously, education isn’t the best or only estimate of capability, but why make students jump through scholastic hoops to compete for positions to which individuals with no credentials have equal access?
sitting there in one of the old, poorly lit, unattractively designed conference rooms on the campus where i work and study, i had second thoughts about my aspirations to work in politics, policy, diplomacy, government.
in order to effect change, you have to play the game of politics; no matter how strong your aversion to the games of clever diplomacy and strategically applied language, id est, talking too much. saying the same thing in a hundred different ways. saying it until just the right syntax strikes the intended chord. there are too many complicated webs to navigate to stay completely pure of intent. i’m sure every rookie idealist learns quickly in his/her first months in washington or any other entity of heavy momentum and influence. all enter with ideas but partisan politics don’t correllate with our impressions of what it is to be american. we greatly value our individuality but don’t realize it only extends to the outer perimeters of our ability to control our immediate surroundings. beyond that, the highways make you conform to the rules or you wreck. period. otherwise you’re just standing on the medians, yelling at passing traffic. those lines can haul the bleedingest heart along and teach them to bite. and i’m certainly not going to turn into some grassroots activist (a term i despise), flapping and squawking about injustices and corruption while the albatross hangs dead around my neck. i’m sitting here with my tow hook waiting for the right vehicle to pass.
isn’t there a place for an disenchanted, introverted, highly analytical, naked mole rat who likes to collect and harvest information? i could work in the bowels of any department, government or otherwise, happily collecting, extracting, and processing data. much like a bowel. i could do that. the little microflora that could.
