Headline, May 01 2025/ JOBS : ''' HOPE GETS HOST '''

JOBS : 

''' HOPE GETS HOST '''

WHAT DO YOU TELL A STUDENT GRADUATING COLLEGE TODAY? '' We owe the next generation some measure of solace.''

IT'S HELL OF a thing to be surrounded by college seniors a month away from heading out into this new America, a land of malice and madness. My fellow professors and I are supposed to have nuggets of optimism at the ready-

Gauzy and gooey encomiums about infinite possibilities, the march of progress and the apocryphal arc, the one that bends towards justice. But all I've got is the metastasising pit of fear in my own gut.

An unfamiliar student appeared at my office door the other day. Her eyes were red, watery. It's pollen season here in North Carolina, but I knew that wasn't why. She was shopping for some consolation, some inspiration, and I guess my shingle looked as promising as any other.

'' Where,'' she asked me, '' do you find hope? ''

I had to stop myself from quipping that I'd sent out a search party but its members hadn't come back, probably because they'd wrongly been detained at the border. I realized that I was stumped - that I hadn't yet plotted a path to the far side of anger and sorrow. I owed her one.

I remembered all the anxiety and uncertainty I felt at her age, the gnawing suspense of being on the threshold of adulthood with no clue what it had in store for me.

I can't imagine that state of mind and flux of emotions with a political moment like this one thrown into the roiling mix.

IT'S AT THIS POINT that I'm obliged to note that my office is at Duke, that my students have the privilege of attending one of the country's most selective and affluent universities and that simply getting a college degree, any college degree, gives them a big advantage.

In fact, America landed in the mess partly because of the inattention to such divides -financial, educational, cultural - and the perpetuation of rules and rites that coddled and flattered one self-impressed class of Americans while condescending to everyone else.

I say that not out of any obligation. I say it because it's true.

And some of what President Trump is doing is exploding that system, trying to reassemble the American economy in a manner that revitalizes neglected sectors and scrambles the cast of winners and losers.

He's after something analogous with the cultural revolution. Let's research, more manufacturing. Fewer experts, more evangelists. Enough with roughage, bring on the beef. Let men be brutes and women be trad wives.

But that doesn't change the fact that the student at my door and college students throughout the country made all sorts of decisions and nurtured all kinds of expectations based on one version of America only to encounter, less than three furious months into Trump's second presidency, a much different one.

It's a situation suffused with bitter ironies :  Those students have often been caricatured and vilified for not seeing enough good in America -for focusing on its betrayals rather than its ideals - and now they're watching its leader betray those ideals hourly, with a shrug, or a smirk or, at least metaphorically, a cackle.

The world is always heaving beneath our feet. We're the beneficiaries or casualties of its shape at a given moment. But is that what I'm supposed to tell a young woman trying to figure out her place and her plan?

This subject and publishing continues. The World Students Society thanks Professor Frank Bruni, who teaches journalism and public policy at Duke University.

With respectful dedication to the Students of America, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the entire world. See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on !WOW! : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - The Voice Of The Voiceless