A Prayer Request

            Hello again, everyone. Since my title today is “A Prayer Request,” I want to start by assuring you that there haven’t been any calamities. No deaths, no injuries, nothing of that sort. Still, those aren’t the only things prayer is good for. The job list came out yesterday, and the process starts. First, a little explanation is in order for those of you who aren’t hunting for professorships as I am, and that’d be most people who read my blog. To my friends in grad school who haven’t done this yet, read carefully.

How the College Job Search Works:

            In the field of foreign language studies, many colleges and universities cooperate in a national database of job listings, the Job Index List or JIL, where they post job ads with qualifications and application instructions for job seekers:  whether they want an experienced professor, whether the job’s appropriate for someone starting out, whether they want an expert in film or literature or linguistics etc. So if you want to teach college Spanish, for example, you set the search parameters for Spanish and run your eye down the list of results, weeding out anything that isn’t Spanish and doesn’t match what you’re qualified to do. For example, if your specialty is twentieth-century South American film, you’re probably wasting your time and the hiring department’s time by applying to a job that asks for a medievalist or to a job that asks for a specialist in Spanish linguistics. My language, as you know, is German. My specialty is applied linguistics, which covers things like translation, foreign language teaching and so on. So, for me the first thing to do is weed out everything that asks for literature people. That’s most of them. What’s left as of today are a few post-doctoral fellowships (a sort of stepping stone between being a student and actually being a professor) and a few general positions where the hiring department hasn’t specified a field of specialization they want. In one sense, the second kind of job ad, the open one, is the toughest one to deal with, because anyone and everyone applies for it. The competition is fierce, and you don’t really find out what the department wants until you dig through it and/or have your interview.

            The application process for becoming a college prof is lengthy and uncommon. Most of the time when you want a job, you apply, interview and either get hired or else not. In the college teaching arena, you first apply. That means writing a cover letter, and in this case cover letters are always read. You make  sure your CV is up to date; this is the collegiate equivalent of a resume but with a few more categories of information. These too are scrutinized carefully. You often include a statement of teaching principles, a statement of research interests which talks about the research you’re doing and the kind you’d like to do in future, and up to three letters of recommendation written by professors who know you well, and one of those professors is always your thesis advisor. Some hiring committees want more than those things I listed, some less. Assembling and mailing this packet of information takes time, and a new packet goes out for each position you apply to. Even starting in September, you usually need October and part of November to do this first part. Next comes the initial interviews. Keep in mind that you’re usually throwing your application packet into a pool of 100-200 other applicants. The odds of even landing an initial interview are stiff, so if you get a call or an email inviting you to an interview, you’ve accomplished something worth being proud of.

            The initial interviews happen between about December to late January depending on the college’s timetable. Many schools choose to interview candidates for language positions at the Modern Languages Association conference. This year that’s in Boston, and I’m already presenting a paper there. I hope by the time I get there that I’ll be doing more than just presenting a paper. I hope to interview there as well. By the time you reach that initial interview in January or early February at the very latest, you’re only competing against about 15-20 other people. Most of them are at least as well qualified as yourself. By now the college that’s interviewing you  has weeded out all the obvious poor applicants, people who applied and weren’t really qualified, people who sent in incomplete applications, people who applied an whose materials were sloppily written, etc. If you survive the initial interview and they still want to consider you, you get invited to visit the campus. By now it’s  anywhere from early February  to about the end of March.

            When I was an M.A. student, our department hired both a new German professor and a new department head. I observed the process twice and saw it up close. A campus visit usually means a couple of days on their campus. You’ll meet all the rest of the faculty, who will be very interested in you. After all, these people might have to spend the next twenty years with you. You go through more extensive interviewing. You give a talk about your research. You probably go out to dinner with department chairs and senior faculty, socializing with them as they try to get a feel for who you are as a person and as a scholar. By this stage you’re competing against maybe two to three other people. When we brought potential German faculty to the University of Tennessee, we brought in four professors. They were all superb people, highly motivated individuals, good scholars who knew where they’d been and where they wanted to go. In the end we could, of course, only choose one. So three others lost out at this point. If you survive this interview process, you’re hired. Next comes a contract, the last chance you have to negotiate or fix anything about the terms of employment, and there comes the offer letter which you sign, seal and deliver. You’re hired. You usually notify the college  of your acceptance of the final offer by early April.

            The process is at least six months long with the prospect of rejection dogging you right up to and including the final interview stage. You’re beating odds at every point, and when you start, your odds of getting a job out of the pool of hundreds who applied for the same job are right on par with drawing a straight five card poker hand. Side note:  the odds of drawing a straight out of a deck of 52 cards with nothing wild and excluding straight flushes and royal flushes are 253 : 1. So when you’re stacked up against 200 other applicants, the tension level is comparable. I want to stay sane, however. So I’m going to celebrate every stage I complete. If I get an initial interview either over the phone or at a conference, I’ll be happy about it. If I get invited to a campus, I’ll be very happy about it, and if  I get an offer, even just one, I’ll be delighted beyond expression.

So, here’s what I’ve found thus far. Right now there are postdoctoral fellowships in Indiana and Canada that interest me and a position or two in Michigan and Texas that could be good fits. The Indiana fellowship is through Valparaiso University, a strongly Lutheran  school, and it’s designed for those who’d like to further their faith and develop their academic skills further in a Christian environment. The fellowship’s open to any humanities field, languages included. The Canadian position is a two-year fellowship at the University of Toronto. The field of interest is translation, anything having to do with it, and that’s what I’ve done for the last four years in one guise or another. The German position at the University of Michigan is a generalist position. I have no idea what they really want, and Baylor University in Dallas wants a linguist attached to the linguistics section of its English faculty. I probably qualify enough to apply there. We’ll see.

Praying without Ceasing:

            All of this brings me back to God and prayer which, as I recall, is where I started. As a bible-believing Christian, I take God seriously when he says that he knows what his plans are for me and that they’re good plans (Jeremiah 29:11). That doesn’t make the application process itself any easier. It’s hard to wait and wonder, praying all the while. At least, for me it is. Still, as a wise Christian once observed, “there are no ifs in God’s plan.”

            I want to get married too, and I didn’t want to marry while still in grad school. When we will do that,  where we will do that and how we’ll do it all somewhat depend on the outcome of this and other job searches that I’ll be doing. So, you see, there’s a bit more riding on this than my own employment prospects. At least, that’s often how it feels. That too is in God’s hands. I used the examples of odds before to give you an idea of how not easy and very much not simple this job process is. The truth, however, is that, outside of actually doing the work of making my applications, prayer is my only remedy for sanity. Why prayer and not Paxil, you ask? Good question.

            I’ve heard people say a good deal about prayer, and one of the things that keeps coming up is that so many people believe things about prayer that just aren’t true. Some say to me, “I’ve prayed about it, but I don’t feel any peace about it. I don’t feel easier in my mind or better about it.” Or some will say, “we shouldn’t pray about that. God wants us to pray for our spiritual needs, not this mundane job search or my mortgage payments.” Or some will say in effect, “God’s too busy to deal with little old me and my trivialities,” or they’ll say, “I shouldn’t pray about myself. I should pray about others. I feel selfish when asking for things for just me.” I’ve met Christians and non-Christians who raise this set of objections to praying for our needs. Some of these objections have the flavor of seeming noble, quite the selfless thing. Some of them seem sensible. They have the feel of being reasonable, rational, sensible, of being anything except helpful and truthful.

            Consider with me a moment. “Let us reason together,” as God says in Isaiah. In Matthew 6, starting in verse 5, Jesus says a good deal about prayer. He tells us how we shouldn’t pray, ostentatiously or so that we’re seen doing so like a politician’s prayer. He then gives us a template for praying, the Lord’s prayer. Some treat the Lord’s prayer like a formula, as though the words of this prayer are, themselves, the only prayer we should be praying. Yet, if you look at it as a blueprint for prayer, you quickly see there are a number of things he commands us to ask for. Some are indeed very spiritual:  forgiveness, the willingness and ability to forgive others, for God’s will to be done, to lead us away from temptation and so on. But we also are called on to pray for our daily bread. This conjures up the image of a bread loaf, but applying it to Americans today, it goes beyond food. It suggests God’s interested in our physical needs:  employment, shelter, food, clothing, etc. In fact, Jesus says a lot in verses 5-15 of that chapter about how to pray, what to pray for and so on. Dealing with the first objection, he never says, not once, that praying will bring you an immediate feeling of peace and certainty. It is, I am afraid, not a magic formula. He said in effect, :pray like this.” He did not say, “pray, and you will feel better about your situation.” But it’s clear to me that we are to pray and to pray persistently for our needs.

            This fiction that God is too busy or too divine to be interested in our mundane life events is both common and unfortunate. It’s at the root of what people are thinking when they tell you to pray for your spiritual needs only or if they feel embarrassed about praying for their day to day needs or if they tell you, usually cynically, that God is obviously not listening or not interested. God tells us again and again throughout the bible to call on him. He’s very interested in our human difficulties. In Psalm 50, the psalmist quotes God directly, “call on me in the day of trouble;
    I will deliver you, and you will honor me” (Verse 15). Several hundred years later the prophet Jeremiah again quotes God, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know” (Jeremiah 33:3). We pray to a God who is listening, waiting for us to entreat him with our needs. Again in Jeremiah, God speaks and says in part, “you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you” (Jeremiah 29:12).

God’s Answer:

I firmly believe that God answers prayer. Sometimes the answer is something we can figure out. We pray that John’s cancer is cured, and it is. Skeptics would attribute this to medical science alone. I’m not a skeptic. Sometimes, his answer isn’t something we see at the time it’s delivered. Sometimes we have to wait a lifetime. Maybe that man or woman you begged God to let you marry at age 25 wasn’t right for you, and you were 65 when you figured that out. Sometimes, God’s purposes and his answers are unknown and unknowable. I admit that one’s hard. We love answers in our culture, the faster the answer comes, the better. We academics thrive on seeking answers in one form or another. Still, this is God we’re talking about. In the 55^th chapter of Isaiah God makes this point about himself,  "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord.  “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). If you want a glimpse, a glimmer of insight into God’s perspective in saying this, think about how you would explain your decision to move across the world and take up a new job to your three-year-old. Could you explain ideas of promotion, cross-cultural exchange, multinational corporations and trade deals to a three-year-old in minute detail? I doubt it. And if our intellects and abilities to reason are so much more refined, if our access to knowledge and ability for strategic thinking are so much better developed than those of the average three-year-old, how much more so are God’s abilities in those areas developed beyond our capacities?

            Finally, God sometimes says ‘no.’ That one can be harder than the unknown. Our sense of entitlement is vast in America. We hate the word ‘no.’ You can see it in many ways, from the kicking and screaming toddler, to the rejected college applicant, to the denied promotion or the denied marriage proposal. As a culture that thrives on answers, we are very unwilling  to take ‘no’ for one. We demand to know why. We ask God why he does things. In and of itself, asking ‘why’  isn’t irreverent. The whole book of Habakkuk shows us a prophet basically asking, “God, why are you doing this!” We are not, however, guaranteed an answer. To Habakkuk God said essentially, and here I’m paraphrasing, , “I am doing this so that both my wrath against your enemies and, too,  my love for you will be plainer to you than ever before. (Habakkuk 1:5-12). To Job he said, “Where were you when I laid the Earths foundation?” (Job 38:4). When Peter, who is by far my favorite apostle, persisted in quizzing the Lord about his intentions and motives,  Jesus said, “What is that to you? You must follow me” (john 21:22).

            So, we’re not guaranteed the answers we want or that we’ll understand what God does. He doesn’t work on our timetable or on our notions of what should or should not be. “If that’s true,” you may reasonably ask, “what assurances do I have at all that God’s worth trusting with my affairs?” I’ve heard forms of this question too. In strictly human terms, it’s understandable. Would you entrust your financial affairs or your children’s welfare to someone who may or may not do as you ask and whose intentions and motives are sometimes unknown and perhaps unfathomable? No, of course not. Yet, you entrust yourself to others in just that way every time you go to work for a new company, take a bus or an airplane or even get married. So in God’s case, what assurances about his intentions do we have? How do we know that he means well in your search for a spouse or my search for a job? We have an answer again in Jeremiah. In a letter written to the exiles at Babylon, the prophet quotes God,  “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11). In other words, my friends, one way or the other, it’ll all work out to your good whether you recognize that good or not. It’s not the easiest answer, but on balance, I can live with it.

Pray For Me:

Now, I’m going to ask you to pray with me as I go through the academic job search  for the first time and likely not the last time. I don’t know how it will turn out. I don’t know where I’ll be next year. I could be drawing food stamps and on social security. Who knows? Who indeed knows? I do not know. God knows. Remember that about your own life as well. I don’t know what you’re going through:  unemployment, tragedy in the family, up for promotion at work, trying to buy a house or trying to have a baby. Whatever it is, you too need prayer. So I ask those of you who read this to pray for me, and if you’ve never prayed before, pray for you first. Meanwhile, that’s where I am. It begins.

A Dangerous Mood

            Hello again. The writer and speaker Ravi Zacharias once said something I found very interesting:  “A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling.” In the wake of the 09/11 attacks, we went through a period of nearly hysterical anti-Islam. In World War II we were rabidly anti-Japanese, even going so far as to intern many Japanese-Americans in ghettos and camps in the continental U.S. A further example:  there was a time in this country when you could not easily find employment if you were an atheist and open about it. See the case of Bertrand Russell, dismissed in 1940 from the City College of New York for his atheistic and anti-religious views. All of these are examples of what we might call ‘mood.’ A mood may or may not reflect the legal situation at a given place and time. It may even be that laws themselves often come out of the mood, you could say out of the zeitgeist, of a place at a particular time.  A mood can be a dangerous thing. It can suppress rational thought and even pervert the course of justice e.g. my previous examples. I begin to wonder whether I’m detecting a different sort of mood in this second decade of the 21^st century.

I was at church this morning when a fellow from U. of I. asked me if I’d seen a new report that allegedly demonstrates that there’s been a consistent rise in hostility towards Christians in America. As it happens, I had not seen this report. I didn’t even know it existed, and I was skeptical. After all, no one knows better than a researcher how the presentation of statistics and case precedents can shade, color or distort what is actually going on. If you emphasize certain facts, suppress others, shade your language so that you make this or that point, you can influence your readers to think as you want them to. Our media does it every hour of every day, quite successfully, I might add. So, though I am a Christian, I was immediately suspicious of a report that purported to make that claim.

            I came home with Nicole and Delaney and looked up the report. It runs for 140 pages, and most of that is a listing of over 600 incidents involving attacks upon the expression of Christian faith. Each incident is well cited, so I could look it up if I wanted to. That’s just good research practice on the authors’ part. This blog post isn’t going to be a rehashing of that report. Though I will post a link to it for those who, like me, don’t want to take someone else’s word and want to examine the document for themselves. I’ll present one or two cases, but I’m going to supplement my discussion of the report with my own experience. After twelve years of study at three large state universities, I can say I’ve had plenty of opportunity to examine this mood for myself. My conclusions will be free of paranoia and well-reasoned even if some disagree.

The Report

“Survey of Religious Hostility in America”

By the Liberty Institute and the Family Research Counsel

Introductions by Pres. Kelly Shackelford of the Liberty Institute and Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Counsel

Here are two sites where you can, as of this writing, download a full copy of the report as a PDF:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/08/24/christians-victims-rising-hostility-from-govt-and-secular-groups-report-says

http://www.westernjournalism.com/report-christians-victims-of-rising-hostility-from-govt-and-secular-groups/

            Case No. 1:

Barton v. Balch Springs (2004).

            Senior citizens at a senior citizens center in Balch Springs Texas were told that they could no longer pray before meals or listen to inspirational music or sing gospel songs during mealtime. The city had recently passed new legislation forbidding religion in public buildings. The seniors sued and were allegedly told that if they won their suit, their meals would be taken away in that place because, the city argued, praying over government-funded meals demonstrated a constitutional conflict. The Department of Justice opened a probe into the matter as well, and the case was resolved in favor of the seniors. The final ruling held that private religious expression like theirs wasn’t the sort of government-sponsored religious talk that the constitution was designed to prevent.

Case No. 2:

Cenzon-DeCarlo v. Mount Sinai Hospital (2010).

            Catherina Cenzon-Decarlo started work as an operating room nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in 2004. During the hiring process, she had the opportunity to sign a form as a conscientious objector to certain medical procedures, and in her form Miss Cenzon-Decarlo indicated that she would not perform abortions because of her religious objections to it. Well enough. Abortions, it seemed, were procedures you could be exempted from having to assist with. In May of 2009, she was ordered by the hospital to assist in a late-term abortion and threatened with termination and loss of her license if she did not comply. She lost in both district court and in the 2^nd circuit court. I looked up the circuit court’s ruling, and the court ruled that the laws that gave protection on the grounds of religious objection didn’t make any allowance for private actions. In other words, Catherina was indeed protected from this sort of discrimination under the law, but, and here’s the trick, she had no right to sue under this particular law as a private citizen. On that basis her whole case was dismissed.

Case No. 3:

Nielson and the Freedom From Religion Foundation v. School District Five of Lexington

& Richland Counties (2012).

            For a number of years now, Irmo High in Lexington County South Carolina has allowed its senior class to vote on whether the seniors will have a prayer at their graduation. The class votes, and a volunteer delivers the prayer if the class voted in favor of it. This isn’t something the school makes them do; it’s the students’ decision, and I suppose sometimes no prayer happens. Well, Matthew Nielson felt that his fellow classmates’ tradition was a violation of his constitutional liberties, and he tried to have the school put a stop to it. The school argues that it’s not officially endorsing the event, that it’s a student-initiated thing and so they’re not obligated to quash it. The case is still pending. Nielson is working with the Freedom From Religion Foundation to press his suit. Whether he will succeed or not is uncertain.

The American Mood:

            That report contains hundreds of cases. Some were resolved in a way that I agreed with and found legally sound. Others were resolved in a way that I personally didn’t agree with, but that I find legally sound. Still others seem to be neither legally sound nor right. On the plus side, one thing that came up for me as I read is that our judicial system can rule in favor of Christians, even if some radical right-wingers want you to think it never does. Sometimes, as my cases above showed, the Christians won, and that was wonderful for them. Sometimes they lost, and some of those losses, I regard as terribly unjust. My concern isn’t with the law. I’m not a lawyer and will never be one. Nor do I think that a long listing of legal case precedents, no matter whose side they favor, can adequately demonstrate the full extent of a mood.

My question is this:  is there really a mood of intolerance towards Christians in America today? I think there is. I’ve met students who, when stating opinions in my classes, worded their opinions in the most secular, non-sectarian way possible. Then in my office, it would come out that they really felt otherwise or that they didn’t express their whole opinion on the subject. I’ve discovered a number of practicing, professing Christian students during office hour conversations like that. One thing that came up again and again during my years as a graduate teaching assistant is that many Christian students are afraid to make statements about their faith or to bring their faith into opinions on political or moral issues in the classroom. Why? Aren’t our universities built on a free exchange of ideas? If they are, then atheists, agnostics and peoples of every faith should be free to share their opinions. Yet, I’ve observed that Christians in particular feel that they cannot do so.

For my own part, for a long time I had a bible verse in my university email signature. Mostly, no one commented on it. It was in German, and that may have shielded me from attack. One professor in my doctoral program, however, took me aside one afternoon and warned me in the friendliest way imaginable that as I’m going on the academic job market, I might want to take that verse out of my email. She explained that some people might view it as a form of religious proselytizing. As I think about it, I recall that I’ve seen many an email with a signature at the bottom. Often times the signature is a literary or political quote. If I included a verse from the Qur’an or a verse from the Bhagavad Gita, no one would have said a word. But because it was a bible verse, and one from the New Testament, I have to worry about being sued for religious harassment or infringing somebody’s constitutional rights.

I wonder. I could include a quote from Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion about how harmful religion is and how it ought to be quashed in some email or statement or other, and nobody would bat an eye. I could write a pro-Islamic statement about peace and Islam in light of our terrorism troubles and describe how the Qur’an is being misused by terrorists, quoting chapter and verse from it and from the hadiths, and I wouldn’t hear a word. I’d probably be lauded as multicultural, inclusive and an agent for intercultural dialogue. I could probably start up a student interest group that explores the ideas and tenets of Jainism, and I’d have no trouble doing so.

Suppose, on the other hand, that I wrote a statement opposing some university initiative, and in doing so, I based my stance on it explicitly on my Christian faith? Supposing I was teaching an applied ethics course and I argued from a Judeo-Christian perspective that there are absolute truths and there are fixed standards of right and wrong? What if a student came to my office and saw me with a braille bible on my desk? They wouldn’t recognize what the braille book is, so they’d ask me, and I’d tell them that it’s part of the bible. In the climate of today, I could then be sued for it. I’d likely win, but the lawsuit would still get filed, I’m sure.

The first amendment can cut both ways. Today, it’s popular to employ it every time you want to suppress a religious display, practice, speech or anything else in the public arena. Yet I argue that it works the other way. Shouldn’t I be free to express my opinions too? You don’t hear about atheists being sued in this country today because they say something non-sectarian. You just don’t see that. But let a student mention God or Jesus Christ in a valedictory speech, let a professor offer a Christian-like opinion, let a person refuse to participate in some work-related function because of religious convictions, and all hell breaks loose. That, in general terms, is the mood of our country in this second decade of the twenty-first century.

It is a mood that succeeds in large part because of postmodern ideals. In the postmodern age, nothing is really true, nothing is really right or really wrong, and all the rest is relative. What’s true for you is true for you, and what’s true for me is true for me, so the attitude goes. I think one of the reasons Christianity is attacked so vigorously in this climate is that it asserts that there are truths and there is right and there is wrong. It’s not the only faith that does so. Islam also holds truths to be absolute. Judaism definitely asserts the rightness or wrongness of many things. But it is politically dangerous to challenge those faiths for a number of reasons. In contrast, attacking Christianity is, to put it simply, safe.

Ravi Zacharias once summed up this mood as follows:

Philosophically, you can believe anything so long as you do not claim it to be true. Morally, you can practice anything so long as you do not claim that it is a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is Eastern, it is granted critical immunity. If western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same of ceremonies from the Eastern fold.

Conclusion:

I’m not going to say that what’s happening in America amounts to religious persecution. Not today, at least. That’s a word that many on the right like to throw about far too frequently. To me, using that word in this country would be a disservice to the Christians of present-day Sudan, to the Christians of ancient Rome and to the Jews who died in the Shoah. Yet, Liberal America isn’t nearly so tolerant as it wants to think itself to be. Christianity is tolerated less and less, and people who believe in the truth of the bible are seen as oddities at best, and as narrow-minded self-righteous bigots at worst. The bible challenges our notions of universalism, of relative truths and self-determined value systems. That makes it, and those who believe in it, unpopular. I wonder uneasily what will happen in America over the course of the rest of my life. I wonder very uneasily indeed.

Why Would You DO This?

            Hello once again. I hope everyone’s having a peaceful Labor Day weekend. Here in Illinois it’s rained for much of the weekend, and while I don’t usually like rain, the mid-west has needed it badly. Delaney and I have been home for exactly three weeks, and she’s settled in nicely. Most of the last three weeks have been spent getting her settled in. On the humorous side of things, I was charged a $13 “new patient fee” at my vet clinic to establish her medical file there. I pointed out that I’d been there with Rudy, my first guide dog, and so, I asked, should I really be charged this fee? “Oh, Sir,” replied the very kind lady at the desk, “you’re not the patient. That’s Delaney.” “But I’m the one paying the fee,” I reasoned. “True,” she said, “but we call you the client. But Delaney is our patient.” ...... One of those interesting moments. Finally, Delaney has taken to Nicole without any troubles. Nicole has, naturally, adopted her.

            I have some blogs planned for the coming weeks, and I look forward to writing them, but first I want to ask you to think with me about texting. Texting is, of course, nothing new, and there’s a lot that could be said about it. First, my own credentials on the subject. As a blind person, I came to texting rather late in the game. Only when I got the Samson Convoy through Verizon did I start to text. It’s convenient for some things, and I keep it as one mode of communication if not necessarily my main means of staying in touch. Now I have an iPhone. The jury’s still out on that one. So, I’ve become more and more aware of the texting culture, for lack of a better term.

            The issue on my mind today came to the for when I read this in a friend’s Facebook status:

If you ever walk behind someone who's texting, you'll discover that not only do they walk VERY slowly, but they have the magical ability to sense which side you're trying to pass them on. They slowly drift in that direction, cutting off any escape, so you have no choice but walk behind them and endure their horribly slow pace and ignorant button-mashing. I bet that 70% of all instances of lateness for faculty and students at UNCG are caused by text-walkers.
AND ANOTHER THING: Have you ever been run into head-on by a text-walker? It's not fun. Just as they can sense anyone trying to pass behind them, they can sense anyone trying to maneuver around them from the front. And with their eyes fixed on their phones all the while, they will mirror your steps until they run into you. This collision, no matter what you did to try and prevent it, is entirely your fault. You know this because their eyes suddenly jolt back up to real life to meet yours in a dirty, accusing glare. In some cases, they harshly remind you to watch where you're going, which suffuses the situation with irony, but unfortunately does nothing for your bruised body, splashed coffee, or trampled toes. You keep walking, with an injured body and injured pride, and hope that they soon walk right into a brick wall.

These comments—and here I’ve only included a portion of what she had to say—make me ask the question once again, are sighted people that stupid? I’ve been in more than one car where the driver insisted on texting while driving, and I have been hit by distracted walking texters. How did I know they were texting? You can hear the click of the buttons as their thumbs wear themselves out. Plus, there’s just a certain dazed air to these people. If they’re not high, not listening to their iPods and not sobbing hysterically, yet they still seem dazed and not quite there when they hit you, they’re probably texting. I’ve been hit by pedestrians and have had several close calls with bicyclists on my campus.

Where does the word ‘stupid’ come into it, you ask? Am I not being a bit too harsh? I think ‘stupid’ is a perfectly justifiable word because these people are dangerous. To make my point, let’s increase the speed of the texters and talk about them in their cars. If you’re talking on your cell while in the car, you probably have a hands-free set, at least these days. Failing all else, you can cradle the phone between your neck and shoulder and keep your eyes on the road. Texting, however, requires you to take at least one eye, possibly both, off the road for up to 5 seconds at a time while you read and reply to the message, the amount of time it takes to drive the length of a football field. How many crashes have there been, not to mention people killed in crashes, that were directly caused by some putz having his or her eyes glued to their phone while they distractedly cruised through an intersection? Legal experts and insurance companies disagree, but it’s in the thousands at the very least and those are just the ones that get reported.

We all know about the instinct for self-preservation. It’s the instinct that makes you want to run or hide when you here gunshots nearby, or it’s the instinct you have to overcome in order to run into a burning building and save a helpless victim. Obviously, it’s less well-honed in quite a number of individuals. Texting while moving, whether in a car, on your bike or your own two feet, has never made sense to me. The first time I heard about it I thought, surely only a handful of very foolish people do this dumb thing. Apparently I was being an optimist. My question is ‘why.’ Why would it occur to you that it’s ok to get into extended text chats while driving your date to dinner or your kids to school? Why do you glare at me, as my friend’s comments above suggest, when you plough into me? It’s your own fault.

The only answer I can find that makes any sense at all is wrapped up in our cultural notion of invincibility. People think, “not to me,” “over there, but not here,” “it’ll happen to that guy, but not me.” This is very youth-like thinking, but it’s not just our teens and young adults that are guilty of it. If it were, I could say that it’s something people grow out of. That, however, does not appear to be the case.

As a blind person I feel myself at greater risk here. I don’t have the option of offering to let me drive if your conversation is that important. I have to either leave your car or take your phone out of your hand. End of options. I haven’t had to do either of these yet, but remember that cab drivers are like anyone else and prone to do it. I know of a driver who wrecked her cab—fortunately without a customer inside—because she didn’t stop in time. She was, guess what, texting while driving. So, this is a practice I have no patience with.

Do I sound irritated? Shouldn’t  I be? I’m always the passenger, and someone’s irresponsibility with their texting not only endangers them—something they’re perfectly free to do at their own risk, this being America—but it puts me at risk. No thanks. I don’t have a tidy solution here. I know that states all over the country are trying to curb this phenomenon. Fort Lee New Jersey has made it illegal to text and walk, the penalty being a $85 ticket. In that state it’s also illegal to text or use a cell phone while driving. In light of these laws, I suppose my point is that they shouldn’t be necessary. Texting while walking or driving is so obviously dangerous that, if just one or two people did it, we could dismiss it and say, “they were just being stupid.” Well, if a whole country is doing it, they’re still being stupid, and personally, I don’t want to pay for someone else’s inattention by being run down in the street by a distracted, texting driver. No thanks.