Letter to My Students at Semester’s End (after reading “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King)

Though I have been teaching you Composition — essentially an introduction to language use in rhetoric, critical thinking, writing and reading — I am foremost a poet. So I do deal in abstractions and inventing realities through condensing language. As you might have noticed, I am a staunch advocate for the imagination, the wilds, an immersion in language as music, the cultivation of an inner life, and romance.

But as I have instructed, abstractions don’t communicate enough. An art of attention to concrete details is needed, an engagement with the world: to do this fully is to know my history, environmental science, as well as a spiritual and cultural accounting of our reality. These graspable and sensorial details are in the hands of those who refuse to ignore them. If there’s anything to take from this class — from the skills of prewriting to reflection to revision — the main takeaway is to please, please do not lose grip on reality.

This is crucial to our collective dignity. We’re now entering a post-truth reality, where the Truth isn’t sought out. It should be fought for vehemently now. You are coming into adulthood in an era where oil ogres and their reality-TV-star president and is governing us through tweetstorms and continued production of Celebrity Apprentice at the cost of utter destruction to our environs.

Even with this painful dismantling of Democracy aside, I have to plead with you: recognize reality by doing something for the common good. Know your rights. Know what fake news is. With the preponderance such misleading rhetoric online and on social media, plus an increase in narcissism and of the homogenous superficiality of bling and Kardashianism, we risk losing the tether to our Common Good. As Obama has recently said, “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we don’t know what to protect. We won’t know what to fight for.”

In the post-factual world, understanding who we are and thinking critically about it ... that is our most important tool. So take another writing class, a History class from a passionate professor, take Women’s Studies or any Humanities coursework. In an era where tech and business has become well-funded at the cost of dumbing down our general course of study, we are now seeing the result of that: a lack of human faculties at work to listen, to research into realms of knowledge, to converse, to be fair. Yet this is how to care.

So, be sure to look at each other when you interact, escort each other home from the bar. Go outside. Turn off the TV. Seek authentic experiences. Be real. Nature is real. Staring outside, the art of attention, that is real. What Thoreau, and a lineage of non-violent theologists like Gandhi and King, wanted is to acknowledge the oppressed by standing with them. For ignoring the world —the hurt, the poor, the un-Instagrammable fancies, that is not real.

Listening, challenging and talking to each other is real. So talk. Talk all night. If you drink, do it to imbibe, to be with spirit, to care and converse and laugh — not to be a ghost of a father as when we read Scott Russell Sanders. Maybe Facebook is a loneliness-maker per the essay we read by Stephen Marche, maybe it is a connector and a fundraiser, maybe it is our collective funeral…but it’s not Democracy. Our voices belong in phone calls to our representatives, our bodies on the streets. Fact check and employ your imagination. Watch the news and then question it. Volunteer. Make art. Sink your bare feet in the earth. Dance.

Be as passionate as you can. For kleptocracy is real. Fascism is real and it is at our doorstep. Also, science is real. Pipelines are real, they are literally millions of years of layers of death turned to oil or shale; To paraphrase Van Jones, or as we saw in Gasland II, to remove it is to insist on blistering death spewing forth. Alternative fuels are real also, they are not a Disneyland, they are possible. This is the only way to save the planet, which you will want if you are to have a future.

What I am saying is: If you do not fight, you are still fighting — as MLK said — but instead of for justice, you are on the slippery slope of apathy and oppression.

So check it: Part of being real, is being humble, and fallible, accountable. Be that and ask that of others. Be true to something… even when it is not cool. Be kind. Possess at least half of the qualities on your list of leader qualities. If you’re ever not sure what is real, go outside of yourself — go exercise, talk to your neighbors,be an ally for others, dialogue with God. And then go inside yourself — ask your inner wisdom, ask your heart, work on knowing your bodies. Insist of your self care. For You are real.

Now I have seen inside your minds and I KNOW you are capable of sustained critical engagement. You’re young and it is kind of your rite-of-passage to have fun or stay innocent to an extent. But, to have fun is not enough. As the youth it is also your duty to make movement, to make change, to fight, and to demand a better future.

Before this fall, I had not taught college writing in a long time; now this is what you’ve taught me: Writing is an act of resistance. The right writing is an act of peacemaking It is something I have always known, but now it is never more true. The act of writing, touching paper, and ruminating while typing, alongside its appendages: thinking independently, reflecting, researching with awe, notating— this is Resistance Absolute. To discover yourself, to be aware despite a dominant paradigm that wants to annihilate all of this, to be real about what you didn’t know, to record and document — these are henceforth preservation acts and a march toward Truth. Such acting precipitates the realm of the Good: natural law, healthy inner lives, and communal intuition that the founders and and visionaries wanted for the country.

Keep a keen grip! I beg you. For the threat of the screen addiction, misinformation, vapid reposting, quick likes, reactionary thread “logic,” and artificial intelligence is accumulating in danger.

In the face of this, to converse, to touch hearts, to build empathy, to consider and consider as David Foster Wallace did with his lobster, to yield a pen as a weapon as Terry Tempest Williams did for her “clan,” this is to value humanity. Have the thoughtfulness and an awareness of the power of what words can do for the Good: Remember Giorgio’s refusal of money over authenticity in “Shattered Genius.” Or Ben Hales’s rendition of Nim-the-chimp in “The Last Distinction” that show us how detrimental ego is, our power- hungry dominance over the natural world. Remember your privilege and to honor your ancestors as Alice Walker did in “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.”

Take action in doing, in being. Be kind in big gestures, but also be patient when you drive. Don’t stuff your emotions down. Don’t overindulge. But def. make Love. Not just in the physical sense, where you always check in around consent, but make Love from an abstract noun into an ideal, into a community: use your senses, co-create heaven on earth, read the world around you. Care for the people you disagree with. Care for those of color, or those being called out or gunned down. Stand with someone less fortunate than you.

Please, be love. Be unwavering for love.

Your professor,

Katherine Factor