The Headmaster of the high school from which I
was graduated wrote his Start-of-School
letter a couple of weeks ago, addressed to students, parents, town folks,
alumni and alumnae. UBUNTU, he
explained, will be the motto for this school year; Ubuntu! Founded in 1842, the school’s traditional motto
is Semper Discens. This year’s motto sets a tone for the students and faculty of a learning community striving to
build people of character and integrity. Ubuntu! Have you ever heard that word
before? Me neither! It is a Bantu word. It is most often translated as “I am because we are.”
Ubuntu stuck with me because of its simple but very
deep message. It resonates a bit like “It takes a village.” If you grew up as I
did, in small-town America, the village helped your parents shape you. Your
parents drove the first stakes, but the local police walking the beat
downstreet helped keep you out of trouble. The scout troop taught you skills to
survive in the woods and in life, the teachers on the playground kept the
bullies at bay and the games moving. Local service clubs sponsored an
elementary school basketball league and provided the town with a swimming pool,
a gathering place for teenagers on summer afternoons; a fraternal order
provided an annual Christmas movie matinee with Santa Clause, and a bag of fruit
from Florida. The churches, on every corner it seemed, created a certain ethos,
a way to live and treat each other. There were cultural norms. There was an Are.
Job growth today is in cities where
technology reigns. Middle-class jobs are disappearing, replaced by robots. A
college degree is the new 8th-grade diploma. As our slow-moving
diasporas creep toward the two coasts and the big cities, small village stores
close, schools consolidate, and people move. If the small towns shut down, what
will be the We Are?
Morris Massey, a professor at the University of
Colorado postulated that You Are What
You Were When. His believed that a person is influenced greatly by their
teenage environment and experiences. We are because of who we were.
Much evidence, a lot of it anecdotal, argues
for Massey’s theory, and generations of plausible explanations exist for Ubuntu.
At three or four score years, people tend to reminisce about their upbringing,
almost always referring to teen years, pointing out how school “wasn’t that way
when I was a kid,” and listing the most
grievous offenses that got them in trouble; starting with comments about
chewing gum in class. The early teen years formed us. They were our When, our Are.
So, does any of this have relevance today? I
think of the young teenagers brought up in neighborhoods well below the poverty
line, living on streets where random shootings occur on a regular basis, where
most qualify for free breakfast and lunch at school and at the library in the
summer. I think of neighborhoods, villages really, where there are no service
clubs to provide basketball leagues, swimming lessons, no books at home to read
or to read others. I think of kids growing up in villages where unemployment is
high, where parents see their children losing opportunities to improve their
lot in life. Too many have no There. Twenty
or thirty years from now, today’s kids will say, “We are what we were when.” Is
today the When we want for them? Many
will remember Ubuntu, “I am because we are.” Is today the Are we want for them?
The choice of Ubuntu for this year’s school
motto encourages us to asks questions: about why we are letting our world
behave the way it does, about our nation’s leadership, about how we contribute
to the divide in the nation, about how we treat each other each day. We must
ask if homelessness and hunger are what we want for our children, our
community. We must ask if are making our villages a better Are.
When the next generation says, “I am because we
are” …?
