COLUMN: Finding food for your mind and heart
Many Cape Codders are experiencing COVID-19 fatigue on steroids. Kids are still having to mask up. Grown-ups have to work, like it or not. But for our seniors, there’s an affordable option for continuing education and excellent companionship.
Check out the Academy for Lifelong Learning (ALL) online and find a wide spectrum of courses, including perils of post-modernism, theology, great cities of the world, molecular biology, home improvement, American history, short-story writing and the poetry of Yeats, to name a few.
When I retired after 34 years at Cape Cod Academy, I was already old and it was time. But I suffered from The Bends — rapid decompression — and I missed my kids terribly. (I still do.) That’s when I was happily recruited by ALL. The program had classes at the community college. My senior students were bright, engaging, with a lifetime of experiences to share. I was hooked.
Then COVID-19 hit and our cohort had special reasons to take care. We retreated to Zoom. As the pandemic refuses to let up, we’re on it still. Compared to sitting around a big table together, Zoom has its share of disappointments. Our companions are credit-card-sized boxes on a screen. Much of the nuance of in-person conversation is stripped away. I know some folks have trouble adjusting to it.
But consider the alternative, which is nothing. When the pandemic first hit, our screens held the faces of men and women who’d just lost marriage partners spanning most of a lifetime. What could be worse than grief wrapped in loneliness? Here, we had company.
The ALL program favors discussions over lectures. My last class was titled Becoming America. ALL offers six- and 12-week classes that meet once a week. I prefer the six-week rhythm. We looked at the historical and cultural currents that made us what we are.
To take one example: the stunning inventiveness of Americans.
In the 1800s, American farmers essentially had the same technologies available to them that farmers had in ancient civilizations: iron and wooden equipment with animal power. Typically, one farmer could feed six people — so most people were farmers.
Then, with the same technologies, American farmers invented the horse-drawn combine and harvester, the steel-edged plow. Suddenly a farmer could cultivate up to 20 times as much land — or feed 20 times as many people. Any civilization could have done it, but after all that time, Americans did it first.
Of course, there are less heroic chapters in our story, too. But for every cruelty, there’ve been countless voices of protest insisting that to be great, America must be moral as well as mighty. History isn’t just something we learn. History is something we have to wrestle with. So on our sixth and final session, two sections (almost 50 people) spent the whole time sharing the collected wisdom and perspective of the group.
Where might we be 25 years out? Optimists hoped the U.S. and China will have established some kind of détente, short of war. Others worried that our internal divisions, fanned by social media and lying politicians, will have overwhelmed us. Some worried America could be driven into mediocrity by the very politicians who promised greatness.
Francoise, with a huge clan still in France, observed that while children and grandchildren were seeking livelihoods across the globe, none were coming here. Too dysfunctional. We do not always see ourselves as others see us.
We listed the elements that people thought made up our greatest strengths: Our system of higher education, our flare for innovation, the diversity that offers us multiple perspectives and a broad national palate … our democracy, freedom … and tied to the “American Dream” what Jo-Anne called the “idea of America.” “It’s still a powerful force around the world,” she said.
But each class, independently, called out threats to the survival of each gift: a growing hostility to education and expertise … increasing hostility to cultural and racial diversity … the increasing concentration of wealth, and the death of social and political comity that — despite differences of opinion — has knitted us together into a single nation.
What we got was an unexpected warning from our elders that America was at risk of committing cultural and political suicide — eyes wide shut — and blinded by a mutually exclusive self-righteousness. Maybe we’ll continue to blame each other all the way down.
But maybe not. There was still a deep pride in all we’ve accomplished together and an inability to believe we might really throw it all away.
Where else these days can we find opportunities for discussions like these?
Lawrence Brown of Centerville is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Academy for Lifelong Learning offers courses on various subjects.
