Multiversity Musing

Just finished teaching my last criminology class.

I wish I was teaching history or science or some subject that wasn't so modern and moral, teaching crime is like plugging into an electrical circuit and I have to ramp down the power into something that won't fry all the students. Or to use another metaphor, you have to give a few drops of life-blood to bring any class to life, but criminology is so soaked in blood and such a hungry subject that I feel anemic at the end of the semester.  The head-space I have to enter for that class is not fun.

Here is one side-effect from decade of teaching this course - there is no such thing as a quite winter night anymore. I used to have nights in December where I would look out at the silence of the snow-covered lands and my heart would unclench, I would curl up in a house like it was a big comfy jacket I could pull on. Still, quiet winter nights. Now I stare out and hear screams: people stressed out, trapped in unbearable situations, families feeling nothing but loss, the mutilated thoughts of predators, the despair of prisons and many reservations, lives that will never right themselves. Now add in the continuous moan of the animal kingdoms as the old die of cold and the young end up as meals (I begin my courses in the animal kingdom because it explains many human criminal behaviours).

"Shhhhh! Shhhhhh! Let the snow fall in silence!", I want to want to command the empty landscape but the noise is in my head. The worst part is that civilization has made it so far that you know much of the suffering is avoidable. So you learn to accept that being human is being stuck in the middle of this mess. No longer just a weird ape but not yet a transhuman angel.

Every discipline give you a different set of 'wizard eyes'. Astronomers look at the night sky and see a 3D scape full of galaxies, clusters and red giants and white dwarfs, a geologist sees not plain rock but a chapter in the Earth's tectonic history, medical personnel can look at the human body and read a thousand symptoms and clues. A sociologist's 'wizards eyes' lets me see all the hidden power and pain that underlies human relationships and society. Your wizard eyes hear a lot of crying, screams of rage, and barely muffled insanity.



Shhhh! SHhhhhH! The elections is over, the semester is done, the students have been 'educated' and set free. Ignore the news, ignore the wars, ignore the criminals in power and the broken men on the street and tent cities. And can someone shut-up the internet, it's like an ADD fascist or something. "Wizard eyes - OFF" "Wizard eyes - OFF!" "Come on, shut off!"