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by PAM
It's been gloomy how many days here in Manila with all that rain, and flooding in some parts of the Metro. Yep, it's that time of year. What made the gloomy days sad and shocking was the news story on the senseless killings in Aurora, Colorado during the screening of "Dark Knight Rises", which is the last installment in the Batman trilogy by Christopher Nolan. Apparently, the alleged gunman, James Eagan Holmes, who left 12 innocent people dead and more than 50 more wounded from the shooting rampage is a scholarly young man with sterling academic record who was pursuing his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Colorado. Man, how did that happen? Here's a young person who, obviously possesses extra-ordinary academic capabilities, looking to put all that potential to good use by pushing himself to the boundaries of academic challenge. And then he dropped out of his Ph.D. Program... and then this! After his arrest, he allegedly likened himself to Joker - the villain in the Batman comic series. What happened? What went wrong? Once again, being in the academic world, this bothers me. *sigh*
With the previous post on pop culture and teaching "big kids" these days, and the circumstance around which this senseless killings in Colorado happened, it's difficult not to imagine a connection between the influence of pop culture on young people and how they go about figuring life out as they feel their way into the realities of adulthood. Just how big a role academics play in smoothing out this connection so these kids do not trip, stumble to confusion, and drown in moral paralysis daunts me!
I think I need to gather positive thoughts to calm down nerves here... so I'm pulling out a couple of my "power shots" in my "pop culture and academic life healthy marriage" trunk. It's a two-part video from one of my favorite talk shows, BBC's "HARDtalk", with the one and only, Stephen Sackur, interviewing the one and only, Brian May, the legend of a guitarist of the phenomenal rock band, Queen, and an accomplished astrophysicist. I keep these videos somewhere in the cyberspace, and when the going gets tough, I try to to cheer myself up with these videos. Here's the first part...
"I got very, very depressed... (difficult) but it (depression) can be the making of you."
... yeah, that feels good. Okay, here's the second part...
"I love being a scientist, asking all those questions of how things work... I also love being instinctive and becoming a part of the universe in a much more unquestioning way...."
Hmmm... okay, I think that Mr. Holmes's case was just a glitch. I will always believe that a "happy marriage" between pop culture and the academe is possible, and when they march out of the church - happily united at last, it should be celebrated! And yes, God must be present... it is His presence that makes this "happy marriage" possible really... and it is the educators' job to try and stand at the "interface" where the mind and the soul meet for these kids to recognize that those two exist on the same plane. The pop culture is the mirror of a society's soul, and what we do when we "learn learning" in school is to keep finding the best possible way to keep feeding and sustaining the soul with the incredible mysteries - God himself - through the daily enlightenment of our open minds.
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Video credit: Thanks, YouTube, for the video links.
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