Newark Mayor Cory Booker

Mr. Booker is a praise-worthy politician, which, in my opinion, means that he is not much like any other politicians. By adopting the philosophies of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, he is trying to create social change in Newark and also encourage and uplift the spirits of the youth of the city. I thought it was pretty amazing that he volunteered to be Sean and Anthony's mentor if the court would drop the charges. It was a bold decision, but I think it was a duty that Mr. Booker was prepared to satisfy. What with the specific threats on his life, it would make more sense for him to hide away from the public rather than get involved in their personal lives, but this is one thing that makes his attitude remarkable. In a city, nay, a country where social change is constantly discouraged or denigrated, he confidently disagrees with the cynicism of the faithless, hopeless, or downright ignorant. This quality makes Mr. Booker an ideal representative of peaceful protest and social change.

My questions for Jimmy Davis

• • Does Belmont take personality into account when hiring faculty? Does Belmont scrutinize the personality of an applicant simultaneously with their personal teaching philosophy, in that they must together be coherent?
  • Does Belmont put restrictions on professors with regards to their personal schedules? Is a teacher allowed to attend school and teach at the same time? How does Belmont evaluate whether a teacher is overcommitted or has a conflict of interest in their personal schedule? How would this sort of issue be addressed?
  • Does Belmont evaluate how teachers deal with conflict, adversity, or student hostility in the classroom? If a teacher has issues in these areas and administration hears of this problem, what action is taken to address this situation?
  • How does Belmont interpret the online teacher evaluations? Are they a significant piece of information that is used for knowing the quality of a teacher? If a student chooses to make a comment in their online evaluation, how seriously does Belmont consider the comment?

Some small thoughts on the "Great Soul".

The brief look that we have taken so far of Gandhi has made me realize how little I knew about him. Of course I knew that he was Indian and wore a loincloth all the time, but I don't think that I could have said much else about him. After watching the Gandhi feature film and reading his DK biography, I have a good sense of why he is such an amazing historical figure. It seems like he was the first person to practice non-violent resistance on a large scale or for a massive revolution and did so with profound success. So it is no wonder that Martin Luther King revered Gandhi's philosophy.

In the introduction to his Selected Political Writings, Dennis Dalton tells the reader how Gandhi thought that "the supreme aim of human experience is knowledge of what Gandhi calls 'the essential unity of man and for that matter of all that lives'" (6). Hegel reverberates this notion in that he believes that all of existence is inseparably connected and that the pursuit of knowledge is to see humanity to have order, or to know that all of reality is united by an Absolute essence that embodies ideas like love, truth, reason, and virtue and works for justice, peace, and goodwill for all mankind. Because Gandhi believed that all living things are interconnected and therefore interdependent, he determined violence to be an act of hatred towards all life forms, something that must be annuled or corrected by its opposite, non-violence, in order for them to be reconnected (or shown to having been connected the entire time). There is no doubt that we find this message in the work of Martin Luther King.

Parsing King's philosophy of the nature of good and evil.

"A sixth basic fact about nonviolent resistance is that it is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice." (King 20)

This aspect of King's philosophy of nonviolence needs further delineation if one is to notice the truth claim that he is making. What's most important, in my opinion, is to not assume that here King is saying that the world is inherently good. He said that, "...there is a creative force in this universe that works to bring the disconnected aspects of reality into a harmonious whole" or that there is "...some creative force that works for universal wholeness" (20). It seems to me that King is emphasizing the idea that all good things come from God without explicitly stating it in this instance so as to make his philosophy approachable for those who do not have faith or who have faith in a deity of another religion.

King makes a claim in his speech "The Most Durable Power" that makes more sense of his views for me. In this oration, his final words are: "He who hates does not know God" (11). Connecting this to King's philosophy of the nature of good and evil, I think it can be easily understood that here King is explicitly stating that all good things only come from God.

These ideas have become a profound point of meditation for me. Would King say that those who do not have faith or a belief in God can still know God, and even that the faithless might be able to know God better than those who actually profess a faith and belief in God? I do not expect to find an answer or a resolution to this exceptionally perplexing thought, nor do I think that this question was posed in any way by King himself, but only by my own curiosity.

Male dominance and father figures.

"'What is it with you men?' she [Mary] said, looking at Will and myself. Her voice trembled slightly as she pulled on her coat. 'Why is it you're always in a hurry? Why is it that what you have isn't ever good enough?' I started to say something, then thought about Mary's two daughters at home, the father that they would never know." (Obama 290)

I think that by mentioning this brief dialogue between himself and Mary, even though he never actually vocalized his thoughts, Obama is acknowledging a theme that is present in Song of Solomon: the lack of father figures depicted in the stories of many African-American boys. Macon Dead's father dies at an early age, provides an unhealthy and incoherent idea of a father for Milkman, Guitar's father dies at an early age, Freddie never knew his and went off on his own at an early age, etc. This is something that Asante Moran describes as a pandemic in the public schools in Chicago:

"Is it any wonder that the black child loses interest in learning? Of course not. It's worst for the boys. At least the girls have older women to talk to, the example of motherhood. But the boys have nothing. Half of them don't even know their own father. There's nobody to guid them through the process of becoming a man... to explain to them the meaning of manhood." (Obama 258-259)

Obviously I don't think that the lack of a father figure being damaging to one's identity (and the pursuit of it) needs to be characterized only in the African-American community. But I think Asante explains very rationally and logically how these boys are in social and filial environments that foster violent behavior; a desire to control their own destiny by creating fear in their opponents or oppressors. In Song of Solomon, of Guitar and Milkman:

"[With regards to male delinquency and succeeding in scaring others or picking fights when they were younger]...When they succeeded they rode the wind and covered their mouths to aggravate their laughter. And when they didn't, when somebody out-insulted them, or ignored them, or sent them running, they wisecracked and name-called until the sweat of embarrassment evaporated from the palms of their hands. Now they were men, and the terror they needed to provoke in others, if for no other reason than to feel it themselves, was rarer but not lighter. Dominion won by fear and secured by fear was still sweeter than any that could be got another way." (Morrison 177)

I think every boy can empathize with the desire to "name-call until the sweat of embarrassment evaporates from the palms of his hands", but it is interesting to imagine that very same innate urge in every male becoming "mature" or becoming more hungry and used for vindictive measures. It seems to me that this is the very process that Morrison and Moran are speaking to.

Marty and Obama share hope.

"That's what the leadership was teaching me, day by day: that the self-interest I was supposed to be looking for extended well beyond the immediacy of issues, that beneath the small talk and sketchy biographies and received opinions people carried within them some central explanation of themselves."

+

"Marty was right: There was always a community there if you dug deep enough. He was wrong, though, in characterizing the work. There was poetry as well - a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask." (190)

I think that these excerpts are quite essential to understanding how Obama took on an open-minded, yet uncompromising idealist perspective of leadership. What I mean by "idealist" is that his ultimate goal is to help the oppressed population overcome their bleak social and economic circumstances, specifically the black community (an extremely "high aim").

However, by focusing on individual stories and cases, Obama could find hope in what he was doing. I believe that this is where Marty's words (to focus on fundamental similarities between people and getting to know what is central to each of them) took merit. It's possible that this advice of Marty's gives an explanation for how someone as seemingly cynical as he to have stayed in the community organizing work, despite his failures and negativity, some kind of hope that even he could believe in although he may not express it in such an optimistic way. This is a hope that Obama became a catalyst for in the organization because of his youth and fervor for his cause, but even more relevantly, his own perspective combined with the advice of Marty.

Obama's early exposure to Eastern religions and culture.

As I have been reading through "Dreams from My Father", I have found Obama's exposure to Eastern religions and culture very intriguing. The setting of his story is so vastly different from my own. Rather than living in the center of one culture, religion, and economy, he learned of multiple cultures, religions, and economies, living in the margins of the world (Hawaii, Indonesia).

He says that his grandfather's "only skirmish into organized religion" was his time spent at a Universalist church, where he could hear "scriptures of all the great religions of the world" (17). Obama seems to have an admiration for principles taught by the religions of the world. But I think most importantly, he was very influenced by the poverty that he witnessed in Indonesia. He was put into circumstances where he was forced to question the issue of poverty on his own. Also, by all of this religious diversification, I think that he was able to understand other people in a raw and genuine way, able to reconcile the problem of suffering by dedicating his life to a valuable, noble purpose. It's plausible, then, that Obama rejects Western idealism and endorses something closer to what I call Claiborne's Kenotic idealism, which has strong ties to values in Eastern idealism such as a connection to the "native soil". However, I can't be so sure of this since part of Claiborne's ideology is joining the poor, but it could still be the case because Obama may be closer to Claiborne's dream of getting the rich to meet or know the poor.