Rapture Happens, Millions of Hindus Missing

In an odd and unexpected twist of fate, Harold Camping, Herald of the May 21st rapture, expressed his complete surprise not that he wasn't raptured, which the world expected, but that thousands of Hindus in India and the rest of the world have been reported missing. "I'm flabbergasted" and "looking for answers," he told a San Francisco Chronicle Reporter today.

Camping, who has previously conceded that he was wrong in predicting the 1994 rapture, nevertheless maintains that the fact that he and none of his followers have been raptured is "absolute proof that [he] is correct. The rapture definitely took place, but there just wasn't a soul worth saving so it went unnoticed." But not in India.

In the Times of India and the Hindustan Times, reports of Hindus having vanished into thin air have shocked and rattled the subcontinent. Indian Prime Minister Manhohan Singh has declared a state of emergency and has cautioned that it does not yet know how many have gone missing, but that he estimates the number to be in the tens of millions.

Those missing have reportedly tended to be younger children, cow-herders, and religious holy men. In the Mathura region in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, nearly everyone has disappeared. The area is mythologically believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Krishna, but local authorities say that it is too soon to attribute a correlation between belief in Krishna and the disappearances.

When asked to comment on the numerous disappearances of Hindus, an ironic contrast to his belief that elect Christians would be raptured, Camping curtly said that he was "very surprised" and refused further comment. Michael Garcia, the special projects coordinator for Camping's Family Radio, offered: "Maybe this had to happen for there to be a separation between those who have [true] faith and those who don't." This would mean that the fluffy liberal idea that "it doesn't matter what god you believe in so long as you believe" is incorrect.

Von Harringa, president of Black Ministries International, commented that "[w]e're still searching the Scriptures to understand why it didn't happen." But judging by the fact that millions of Hindus have vanished and that every Christian remains accounted for, he could be searching in the wrong Book.

UPDATE 8:54 PM: On tonight's Family Radio, Herald Camping has explained the Hindu disappearance by citing that the "first shall be last and the last shall be first", explaining that the first are those who have had access to the Bible for the longest and the last are those who have not been exposed to it. This only serves to corroborate why so many Hindus have disappeared and Christians remain on earth.

Living in the Moment

"Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That is why I call it the present." I disdain this quote, as it at once affirms both the American preoccupation with "the moment" and the practical impossibility of living in it. While the original quote, of which the aforementioned populist phrase is but a segment, comes from Alice Morse Earle's 1902 book Sundials and Roses of Yesterday", it speaks acutely to the present era and what I'll call the information-overload generation. The quote, is naively optimistic. It beseeches that we make the most of today because it is the only time we have, for we know not what tomorrow brings -- if it comes at all. It's lovely, really. It's a great mantra for the summer months when school children have little to do. But for most of us, unfortunately, its impractically fails at resonating.

We live in a society that values clinging to the moment -- a tryst with carpe diem -- but it's a fantasy that must exist to ironically distract us from its inverted reality. Our society runs on deadlines. It requires planning and preparation, management and oversight. It requires thinking again and backtracking to make sure that everything is taken care of. Often, it requires multitasking, which by definition precludes one from giving full attention to one task. Unless one is a guest at an event and good at compartmentalizing the bottomless To-Do list we all accrue, then living in the moment, as the apposition would infer, is culturally inconceivable.

Money Buys Experience, but does it also buy Education?

If I was to write an essay contesting or debunking the so-called value of an education in American colleges, I wouldn't expect many people to read it. Such articles are as common now as hipsters in independently owned coffee shops. Yet, such articles still continue to pour forth across the nation's top news outlets – as if there was something new to be said... something more than the silently affirming nod of empathy automatically elicited from reading something we know to be true. There isn't. Yet, perhaps there is something to be said about the frequency that such articles appear in print – namely, that nothing breakthrough has been done to combat the dismal state of public education in primary, secondary and post-secondary school. Visiting the Federal Dept. of Education's website drew my eyes to one link on their bulletin board from this past week entitled "Increasing Educational Productivity: Innovative Approaches & Best Practices". Upon scoping it out, I was disappointed to discover that it was about "doing more with less". In other words, given the recession and budget cuts, how can we strain our resources further? It doesn't take an economist to point out that along the indifference curve of educational output measured against resources allocated, one simply can't expect a comparable output with limited resources. Drawing from the well known maxim from Charles Swindoll that life is 10% what happens and 90% how you react to it, then an underfunded, under-qualified, test-driven and over-ambitous education curriculum is what happened; how are you supposed to react to it? Optimism doesn't educate; good educators do.

So why do we not have good educators? It's not that we don't, but that we don't have enough – an ongoing budget problem that The Onion alludes to in a cutting piece of satire. Of course there is Teach for America, the privately funded organization that recruits some of the top students from the best colleges to teach in the worst school districts in the country, but a study done a few years back proved that on average they were no more effective in the classroom than their peer, professionally certified teachers. Maybe it's not a fair comparison given the lack of thorough training with respect to going to school to be an educator, but we're after results here, and they speak for themselves.

It's a moot point by now to speculate as from which areas of spending the federal government could re-appropriate funds to education, so I won't mutilate that dead horse here. Instead, I'll talk about turning it into glue as many more affluent American families do. I'm talking of course about private schools. Privatized education allows for a curriculum to be independently created based on values of the investors and may actually be the saving grace of education in America. Of course, the problem is the cost, which many American families cannot afford. But what if, hypothetically, the entire budget of the department of education gradually went toward outsourcing the education of the American public to private schools with proven results in the form of heavy subsidization? In a globalized era in which greater specialization allows for more opportunity for outsourcing, it only seems logical to let the experts handle the education of our nation's youth. I don't have the figures to estimate the feasibility of the proposal and I'm sure it would be exorbitantly expensive, but it would be an investment in the America of tomorrow. If we can continue to go into bottomless debt to fund our security and military expenses around the world, then why not put a small dent in that debt and acquire enough funds to rectify the educational problems in this country? Or is the future less of a priority than the present – the immediate danger more pressing than the looming one? Life shouldn't be so black and white, especially when human lives are on the line.

As things stand right now though, at least at the collegiate level, the value of an education is dubitable. One glaring difference between most universities in America and those in Europe is that American universities collectively foster a nurturing value of the student experience. This has led to a whole field, Student Affairs, in which individuals can learn how to best meet the holistic needs of the student body – everything from activities to discipline. This includes a Dean of Students position – a specialized role under the Dean of the College. American collegiate culture also rather uniquely offers the opportunity for Greek life, which I am unabashedly a part of. While the value of fraternities and sororities has been hotly contested over the years, I won't go as far to say that it is without value – as it directly contributed to improving my college "experience" and introduced me to a number of opportunities to which I likely may not have been exposed. However, despite the alleged value of Greek organizations as purveyors of social opportunity, doers of community service, and conduits for leadership – all of which I can attest to from my own experience – Greek life has an unfortunate symptom that has pervaded American society. That symptom is the proverbial "it's not what you know, but who you know" culture endemic in the private sector. While it is also to some degree true in other sectors and also among non-Greeks – as well as in other nations – my point is that a society that values relationships more than objective qualifying knowledge (Note: not independent of, but more than) lends itself to a culture that places less value on erudition and individual achievement and more on political allegiances. I could segue here into tirade against the inefficiencies of our two-party system, but I'll save that for another time. The take away here, as we return to the point, is that perhaps it's time we re-evaluate what we would like our children to walk away from college with. Are we paying for them to have an experience that allows for them to take easy classes and still walk away with a degree, or are we paying for them to receive a scholastic education? Unfortunately parents cannot just decide what they would like for their children, as the institutions dictate the horizon of possible experiences.

If change is to happen – if change is indeed desired – it has to happen up top at the federal level, that it will a nation-wide effect. But first, the federal government must recognize the urgency and magnitude of the problem of the American education system and commit to actually doing something about it. Otherwise, we're destined to live in a bleak idiocracy.

The Story Never Ends

For a while now, I've had the random, recurring urge to watch the 1984 movie Never Ending Story. It must have been 15 years since I last saw it and it left little impression on my memory as a child except for having a boy who rode a flying white dog. Last night, some friends came over and after a couple drinks, I got the urge again. So I pitched it to them as follows: "Would you like to see a movie that will blow your mind?" It was a compelling enough ploy to cover up for my complete ignorance of the film. We watched it, and much to my unsurprised dismay, it was terrible. Poor dialogue, abrupt and poorly rationalized plot developments, and the cheesiness of the whole thing caused us to cut it out 2/3 of the way through and go to bed. The next day, however, I watched the remainder of the film and was blown away – not by the film itself, but the creative framework in which the writer constructed to communicate several very profound ideas that are worth sharing.

In the storyline, a boy picks up a book and begins to read it, thus framing the rest of the narrative. The Nothing, a seeming placeholder for a diabolical destructive force – imagined as a hurricane of sorts – encroaches on the world of Fantasia, the Alice-in-Wonderland-meets-Middle-Earth mythological realm of the story's setting. Only the empress can stop The Nothing from destroying the world, but she is sick, so a young warrior must venture out to find the cure for the empress that the world may be saved. That's the plot, and its execution is rather boring, in my opinion. What is fascinating, however, is the symbolism employed and to some degree explained at the very end.

The Nothing is explained to be the metaphysical manifestation of the lack of hope and imagination in humanity. The implication is that because people are reading less, they lead dull and unimaginative lives. Fantasia is revealed to be a composite land of the the human imagination, and so the encroachment of The Nothing signifies the death of human imagination and capacity to dream. While it's a brilliant allegory signifying the take over of the technological age and the eschewing of classical pastimes such as reading, the kicker is even better.

The first lair of the kicker is that boy reading the book is as much in the book as every other character, and the feels all the emotions and thoughts of the characters. This is a wonderful and rare Western rendition of one of the themes in the Mahabharata, that the reader is every character in the book. Not only that, but the reader can influence and interact with the story to the extent that the empress at the end reveals that she can stop The Nothing if the boy will but give her another name. As inane as this sounds, it signifies the reader's admonition that he is not just a passive observer, but an active participant in the story. By acknowledging this in the act of orally naming the empress, the boy accepts his role in the story.

The second lair of the kicker is that the reader is the writer of the story itself! This goes further than simply imagining what the words play out in unillustrated pictures, but that the story being read is but one of as many stories as the boy chooses to imagine. This message is signified when the boy finally yells out the name of the empress, all goes dark, and the boy continues to converse with the empress as he was struggling with her suggestion that the story was in fact real and the boy, Bastion, could therefore impact it. As the light returns, the empress and the boy continue talking for a few moments before the boy realizes that she materialized in front of him – rescued from her immanent destruction. The implication I draw from this is in the power one has in imagining the possibilities. The empress then presents the boy with a grain of sand – the last remnant of the realm of Fantasia – and tells him to make a wish. He asks how many he can make, and she says as many as he wants. The half-stated implication of this is that we all live never ending stories so long as we're willing to imagine new adventures and possibilities.

It's a thoughtful lesson of which America would do well to be reminded.

Lastly and as more of a tangent, the film reminded me of the power of names. While the old Shakespearean query comes to mind – "What's in a name? Were a rose called by any other name would it not smell just as sweet?" – we see in this film why it doesn't hold true. As I learned in studying Hinduism, names convey power, often in the form of access. By this I mean that when you see something and don't know what it is, and then it is named, you suddenly can place the object or event in an existing schema from which you can draw upon to understand the already learned properties of the object or event. Put differently, let's say you have a cough, a slight fever, and several other symptoms. You then search online for illnesses that match your symptoms, and upon finding the name of one, can then look into treatment for it. Similarly, in many mythologies, knowing a character's name gives you access to the reputation and lore of that character. The more names a character has, the more powerful and important he or she tends to be. Sometimes characters also have secret names that, when learned, give access to some vulnerability or control over them. In Never Ending Story, every character is named, and with each name we learn something about them. When the warrior reveals his name to the wolf, the wolf acknowledges his mission to kill the warrior, and so attacks. More tellingly, when the empress beseeches Bastion to name her and he does so, the acknowledgement of the act of naming brings forth a reifying power that saves the empress from destruction. It is romanticized, to be sure, but the trope of the power of names is a valuable and often overlooked literary device embedded in the narratives of our lives.

When the celebration of life succumbs to the celebration of death

We are America, paragon of civilization. We are America, exemplar for the world. We are America, who rejoices at the death of our enemies. Are we really? Is that really US? Since the recent slaying of wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden, the general response of the American people and media has been one of celebration. While as a country we are celebrating the death of a terrorist, latently we are affirming our inferiority to the ideal of civilization. We are no better than than enemy who celebrates the deaths of innocent victims of terrorism. No, Osama was not innocent, but we as a nation should have more dignity than to celebrate his death – as if it meant anything more than a case closed on an open file that hasn't been relevant for years.

The fact that Americans are celebrating is not bad in itself, but that they are celebrating for the wrong reason. They celebrate because they still think Osama had an active role in commanding Al-Qaeda schemes, when more likely the significance of his death is closer tantamount to the enemy killing a former US president – emphasis on former. What Americans should be celebrating is the felling of a symbol – of the face of the enemy, of the vulnerability of America, of grievance from the tragedy of 9/11. The death of a symbol is far more powerful than the death of a person.

That is really what was at stake in Obama's directive to kill bin Laden. Sure, there likely was political capital involved as re-election draws near. But his directive wasn't to kill bin Laden the person, it was to eradicate bin Laden the symbol. When the fear is gone, the object feared still remains. Yet lacking cognizance of it by removing the face of the fear, Obama has done Americans a great service in implicitly making the world a safer place by terminating America's arch-nemesis and erasing the possibility of his direct legacy from influencing the annals of the future. No, it is not true that we are any safer when we go abroad; yet I'm sure that at least at a subconscious level each and every one of us are sleeping better at night knowing that the face of American fear has literally been effaced.