It was twenty years ago

As a high school student, and especially as an electrical engineering undergraduate, the urge within me was to understand the human condition and the economic deprivation that was all around me.

Naive that I was, I thought the answers could be explored through formal graduate schooling.  It turned out that much had been investigated and written about even those couple of decades ago.  The more I spent time in the libraries and the classes, the more I was convinced that there was very little--if any--for me to explore and contribute.  Unlike in electrical engineering, where revolutionary insights took us from the diode to the transistor to the integrated chip and Moore's Law, and the world of unknown that was ahead, for all purposes everything had already been explored about the human condition and the relative economic deprivation around the world.

Thus, it was not the pedantic understanding that was needed, I decided, but a way to connect the understanding gained with the people outside academe.  Sometime during my final year as a graduate student, in a conversation with a faculty, I outlined to him my interests in being an academic who does not engage in formal academic research but in scholarship that would be for a non-academic audience.  Like writing newspaper opinions.  .

He thought it was much needed.  But he warned me that academia would not care about any intellectual approach that did not conform to established protocols.  He said something along the lines of "they will get jealous of your public exposure, and you will not get any support."

A month after graduating, my first ever newspaper opinion piece was published.  That was twenty years ago, in July 1993.  Against the background of the Fourth of July fireworks, I argued that the American society ought to worry not about restricting fireworks but about restricting guns.  Twenty years ago, and I shudder to think about the number of people who have died from maniacal violence since.

Over the twenty years, the number of published newspaper opinions stands at 158, which averages to about eight per year.  I suspect that the rate would diminish as I go forward, particularly because of the rapidly decreasing newspaper readership.

So, as I get more into the twilight of a mediocre career, I wonder if this route that I consciously chose was any more constructive than the options that I discarded.  It is not easy to figure out counter-factuals.  It is what it is, of course.  However, I like to believe that it has all been worth it, and that I did not stray away from that goal of understanding the human condition and economic deprivation and doing my tiny little bit to address it.