The Agony of Defeat

Commentary by Wanda

Many of you may remember a familiar line from the narration of ABC’s Wide World of Sports, “...the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” My brother who was and still is a sports fanatic, watched it every Saturday afternoon and if I wasn’t locked in my room reading books, practicing piano or practicing my landing from an imaginary vault just like Mary Lou Retton, I was sitting on the couch watching this show. (Yes, I’ve been a nerd my entire life) This week the tragic news from Blacksburg, VA has been enough to make even the most jovial person slide into depression. I think that we must always make the best out of the hand that is dealt us, but those lives can never be replaced… they’re lost. I have watched the school’s response to the tragic events and I’m all for school spirit (“Go Hokies!”), but honestly this has nothing to do with school spirit. Their ability to overcome this tragedy, outside of all the measures they will take to change policies and procedures, will be the way they understand and handle pain.

We are a part of culture that wants to always excel, overachieve, win by a landslide, and beat the world’s record. But that’s not realistic. We don’t always win. Everything can’t be explained away by scripture or religion. Sometimes we get trampled on by life and that’s that. Sometimes just say “life sucks” and there is no easy way to rationalize it. I do believe that “earth has no sorrow that heaven can’t heal”; we do have to experience the sorrow and the lost. In the case of the VA Tech shooting, we lost not only 32 lives but also the life of the shooter. We lost because a young troubled man took the lives of others and finally himself because he was deeply tormented. We lost because 32 promising lives are no longer with us; what they had to contribute to this world will never be realized.

Those who will have to recover from this tragedy have to face the inevitable – the gut wrenching pain of loss. To be human is to experience pain as much as it to experience love. This world is not always loving and kind, but is many times evil. However, love is evil’s strongest opponent. And as those who choose to act in love know, that agony and pain are a part of what makes our expressions of love possible, necessary and powerful

Response by Cantice

I empathize with Wanda’s stance toward pain and remembering the tragedy at Virginia Tech. She well said that the potential of those 32 lives will never be realized. For that I have and will mourn with those that mourn. And like so many others I’ve spent time thinking through ways to prevent a similar tragedy from happening again. I concur with people who wished that students would have arisen courageously to confront and overpower the offender before so many lives were taken. But I also believe that universities can collectively arise to respond to this human tragedy by reaffirming their commitment to value human experience in the classroom.

My experience teaching English to college students for the past seven years gives me another perspective of the resistance to pain as normalcy that Wanda mentions. One of my areas of interest in the intersections of English, Composition, and Women’s Studies is therapeutic writing. Students and practitioners of therapeutic writing understand that writing may facilitate, speed, or complete healing from traumatic events. No one is sure how this works. Some say that writing gives the victim power to reframe the event and take control of it; others believe that just breaking silence allows healthy human functioning to resume. Whatever the mechanism at work, we all agree that there is something therapeutic about writing.

In the university, however, some administrators express discomfort and antagonism toward plans to teach theories and practices that deal with writing about trauma or affective categories to first year or lower division students. Their reservations are understandable. Shouldn’t talk of feelings be relegated to the counseling center, or the dorm bedroom? What place does affective demeanor and response have in our performance-driven classrooms and boardrooms? To that I have an answer. Before a person reaches “the breaking point” they exhibit signs that many of us ignore. I’m as guilty as anybody. And I know I won’t change unless caring is put on my agenda.

In universities, in the humanities division, and in the English department specifically, we do ourselves a favor by paying attention to “the writing cure.” Research in the social sciences (led by studies by James Pennebaker) has pointed for years to writing’s efficacy as a healing agent in both mental and physical dis-ease. But I am not suggesting we perform these experiments on students in the English department. In the English department, where writing is the medium, I am suggesting that administrators allow professors to give due time and space to the affective dimension of writing, to value writing that allows the author to be in the center of the experience and articulate feelings of pain, joy or dissatisfaction.

Going forward universities can reclaim the affective dimension as something that is good for their bottom line (emotionally healthy people perform better and longer). But, just as tenuous as the concession to allow students to write about their pain is the argument over how best to respond to these students. I don’t pretend to know the best way to do this. But I think that acknowledging the pain in the writing prevents the pain from boiling, like a pot on the stove that goes unaddressed until all the water is gone and something gets burned. That is what happened in Virginia last week and in the preceding months.

Loud and Wrong

Commentary by Cantice

It took news stories announcing Don Imus’ racist statements and the Duke boys’ declared innocence to bring me out of my self-induced isolation. So let’s get right down to business. Don Imus is a victim of his own enablers. MSNBC hired him for his controversial, backwoods commentaries and when his antics were highly publicized at an inconvenient time, he was fired. In the case of Evans, Finnerty, and Seligmann, formerly of Duke’s lacrosse team, justice served them as it does today for any perceived victim of reverse- or traditional discrimination.

That said, the prejudiced woman in me is a little disgusted at the way North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper is popping up all over the news exonerating the bunch of ex-athletes. When these three student-athletes invited two strippers to their home in spring of 2006, they must have been getting a jump start on refusing to be role models. If you know my background, you know I’m glad that the bunch was made into a spectacle. Immature sexual behavior brings its spectators and their communities into sinking sands of depravity and should be exposed, if perhaps to save one headed down its path. But if evidence in their favor was withheld and charges were sustained beyond the cases’ legal viability, then I guess they should be vindicated to the greatest extent possible; I would expect as much if the races of the accuser and defendants were reversed.

Justice in the case of Don Imus has a high price. On the one hand, it was shameful that a mainstream news company carried his Archie Bunker commentary. But in the real world, his radio show attracted enough listeners to warrant MSNBC’s endorsement. On the other hand shouldn’t some common places be free from indictment if members of one group want to candidly speak about members of another group? What I’m saying in plain English is, if Tom Joyner was to call Britney Spears a silly, ball-headed cracker, would the African-American community nod in agreement, or demand that he be snatched off the air?

Double standards usually come back to bite somebody in the butt. I don’t want it to be me one day. Whether in my classroom, at my church, in my living room, or on this blog, I don’t want to feel like my speech must be bridled, especially since my voice changes to cater to my intended audience. I do myself a favor to keep my speech free from obscenities or other reactive statements that would misrepresent my character on a good day. In the public sphere, when it all comes down to it, my voice, be it prejudiced, ignorant, or educated and sensible is all I have.

Response by Wanda

I think you’ve covered everything I would say about the subject. My natural proclivity is to deal with the Duke University situation, but this week I will mix things up a little and talk about the double standard African American women have exercised this week in calling for the termination of Don Imus. You should know by now that Imus called the Rutgers University women’s basketball team players “nappy headed hos.” I am not going to deal with the “hos” portion of his commentary because I believe we have discussed that enough. How about the nappy head comment? Why is nappy head a derogatory term? Most African American women unless you have loose curly hair, our hair is nappy (or kinky--I avoided the pejorative analogy “good hair" vs. "bad hair” as if hair has values or morals).

I will not mention the names of women, including close family members, who have literally prayed for their children to have “good” hair. What about videos, television and movies? How likely are we to see roles for “African-American” women cast with Bi-racial women who have curly hair. I even hear people say “Oh yes she’s pretty with that good hair” so what’s wrong with Don Imus saying out loud what you think or imply on a weekly basis?

I have not made the jump to natural hair so I gladly embrace my relaxer every eight weeks. However, I do not see an intrinsic value in naturally curly hair, straight hair or nappy (kinky) hair. Healthy hair vs. damaged hair should be our understanding of the quality of hair. If we empower ourselves and celebrate the diversity of hair textures (especially with our children) that would take the control from ignorant people like Imus to denigrate what is unique to our race.