A blessing in disguise?

The unplanned exit from the teaching job has had plenty of repercussions.  From where I live to what I do every single day to even when I travel to India.  There is no paid job to attend to, which means I begin every day with a blank slate.  My visits to India are no longer restricted to the winter and summer breaks between academic terms. 

Upsides are in plenty, but it does not mean that I am going to send a thank-you card to my former employer.  After all, a layoff is a layoff.

The exit from teaching has also politically liberated me. 

When I was employed, I did not want students to think about my political leanings when we explored and discussed various issues in economic geography.  Whether we like it or not, and whether it is true or not when it comes to individuals, we associate political parties with cut-and-dried positions on issues, and I could be guilty by association with any particular party.  (Many faculty colleagues found me guilty because I did not associate with their party.)

But, my job--and my personality too--was all about the nuances that I wanted students to think about.  Politics almost always precludes nuances.  So much so that a former President, a Republican he was, famously said that he doesn't do nuance.  What a shame!

Let me give you an example.  Consider offshoring of jobs.  It is considered a bad, bad thing here in the US that multinational  corporations outsource some of their operations to countries like India or Vietnam.  The stereotype is that the Democratic Party is the one that cares about labor and working conditions, and that it caters to labor unions that are opposed to such outsourcing.  On the other side, the GOP is viewed as being pro-business and, therefore, it does not care about people who lose jobs as a result of offshoring.

Not that there is no truth in these representations.  Offshoring often leads to people losing their jobs.  Corporations benefit when operations are shifted to low-cost countries.  But, there is a lot more to the offshoring issue. 

For instance, I wanted students to consider the economic status of India or Vietnam, where people are desperate for jobs.  Is there any secular or religious law that grants Americans the rights to those jobs, and that Indians and Vietnamese should not pursue those?  Wouldn't Americans benefit from the lower costs of doing business in India and Vietnam?  Should we not care about the much poorer India and Vietnam?

In the newspaper commentaries that I authored, including about offshoring, I often explored the grey areas in our collective issues.  If everything were black and white, then it is remarkably easy to formulate public policies.  But, our collective issues are complex, and developing public policies is not easy.  Just as in the classroom, here too I was more interested in making people consider the nuances and not fall into the trap of the stereotypical political party talking points.

After the layoff, I no longer have a responsibility to educate anybody.  Local newspapers are dead, and it has been a long time I wrote any commentary in that media.  I write here, and I assume that regular readers and any accidental reader are like me who want to think about things. 

I have been freed, which is why earlier this year I changed my affiliation in my voter registration.  I came out of the political closet and I don't care anymore 😉