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I have a friend. When she is feeling particularly irritable and one of those giant pickup trucks roars by seemingly absent of any sort of exhaust system, certainly not a muffler, she curls in her three aft fingers, extends her thumb and index fingers about an inch apart and waves them over her head. Try it. You'll get the picture. Pickup truck owners, especially owners of the big loud trucks, are often maligned as being in possession of small male appendages and owning the great compensator.

I've recently been thinking about Ph.D.’s, especially academic ones, as the equivalent of big loud trucks. Just another huge investment into a different form of compensation vehicle to demonstrate value and power - worthiness. To create a social safe haven where some injured aspect of self can feel buttressed. "That's different!" exclaims the Academic. "Our efforts bring great advancements to the world!" Aren't many of those "advancements;" the byproducts of their manufacture, and their use, not the very thing those same academics are decreeing as poisoning our planet and driving us into global warming? Aren't Ph.D.’s involved in the development of the technologies that designed and manufactured that pickup truck? Considering most drivers of these trucks work in the trades, I ask if their contributions are any less valuable to us as a society than those advancements the Ph.D.’s hold up as trophies? The tradesmen are the ones who build our homes and the factories that put shoes on our feet.

I know I have ruffled a lot of feathers in the opening of this writing. Let me assure you my intention at the heart of this is not to directly support or malign anyone. I have dear friends and loved ones that drive pickup trucks, and I have the same in the way of friends and loved ones that hold at least one Ph.D. The woman I love has a Ph.D., and I hold enormous respect for her. My point is actually to illustrate that we all have insecurities, and we all compensate for them somehow, regardless of the social paradigm we subscribe to. And sometimes that "compensator" is just the outcome of passion and hard work.

We live in a world today where petty local squabbles have the ability to nearly instantaneously become global social divides. Then these divides distract us all from the fundamental issues desperately needing the coherent attention of truly cooperative societies. Looking at one another as "dumb hicks" and "arrogant tower dwellers" blinds us to the reality that while we squabble divided, we are unified in orchestrating our destruction. The academics and engineers devise increasingly potent, more resource-intensive discovery-driven inventions, and the blue-collar folks turn over their dance card to build it all and supply the resources that again get used to drive more consumption through invention. Together we dance in our divided perspectives, blind to our actions unified in intolerance.

My fundamental point under all of this is that we all feel joy, pain - and insecurities; we all have dreams and goals and fears and remorses. If we don't finally get it figured out that we are all in this together, so that we finally unify in tolerance and work to build upon one another’s assets while helping to overcome one another’s pains, it won't be the pollution of our invented and built advancements that kills us. We will die of pettiness born of our insecurities for which there will, in the end, be no compensating.

Journey on ...