Connect the Dots

You might have already noticed from my mastery of the English language, but my education was... expensive. You might say, "overpriced". Approaching a year out of college, I've been wandering what my liberal arts education really did for me, besides place me in eternal debt to my parents. I am, after all, a graduate with a BA in religion, living on a farm. How in the world is a degree in Religion going to help me in the real world? Is there a tangible set of skills that I've taken from 22 years of schooling?

Happy to say that I think there is. Here it is: "Connecting the dots". That is the phrase I've chosen to describe my education. Thousands of dollars to teach me how to play a simple children's game. Let's think about it, shall we?

Two points spaced apart, with no apparent connection, random, seperate. You have to connect them and thereby change the nature of their relationship so that they are interdependent. And then, like magic, once you've connected the dots, you see the big picture. Or the picture is revealed to you, and you understand. Simple childhood game, yet my poor parents sacrificed a lot for me to learn how to play it. For my part, connecting the dots is what higher education is all about. What good thinking is all about. Connecting supposedly random bits of information, events, places, people, and seeing the bigger picture they create. Here's a relevant set of "dots": 1) A diabetes and obesity epidemic, 2) unchecked industrial food production, 3) extreme environmental degradation, 4) a suspiciously cheap, gigantic mountain of food, 5) rampant poverty across the globe. These are the dots, and they need a solution. The tendency of reductionist science, which reigns supreme these days in American thinking, would be to deal with these dots independently of one another. Better treatments for diabetes, new pills for weight loss, a blossoming organic industry like WHOLE FOODS, state of the art technology for "greener" living, alternative energy, farm subsidies. All of these solutions created without consideration for the relationships between the dots. Reductionist thinking.

However, if we take a page from nature's notebook (a few billion years in the making), we would know that things tend to be so integrated with one another, so unbelievably interdependent, that we miss the connections. To deal with these "dots", you need to connect them and see the big picture. How are diabetes, factory farms, a damaged environment, and poverty connected? When you start asking these questions and drawing the lines, real progress is made with real thinking. Connect the dots, and everything becomes more clear. That is what 22 years of school has given me. Not a mastery of biology, or books, or dogma. Just the ability to step back and connect the dots.

It's funny, you know. We spend so much time trying to grow up and be adults, only to find that thinking like a kid was enough. My defense for my immature sense of humor, as well as Monty Python's.