In relatively recent times, northern Utah has been visited by three quite distinctive wise men, each bearing singular gifts containing a similar central theme: Education profoundly affects perception and, therefore, both the moment in which it occurs and the incessant flow of history.
Spike Lee, sporting his signature tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, was first out of the chute when he delivered the University of Utah’s annual Tanner Lecture on Human Values a few weeks back at Kingsbury Hall.
Maintaining that our country will never achieve greatness until we honestly confront racial issues, “that great big elephant in the room,” Lee spoke of the effect it had on both his upbringing and his choice to become a filmmaker.
Speaking deliberately and earnestly, almost in an academic fashion as befitting the setting, yet “spiked” throughout by the same quick-draw humor that populates his films, Lee spent a portion of his allotted time connecting education, and the lack thereof, to the current state of racial relations in both America and the world at large.
Noting that his forebears were educators — his grandma taught art for 50 years, and he was a third-generation graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta where he received his introduction to film as a mass-communications major before going on to film school at NYU — Lee stressed that “there is nothing cool about being ignorant.”
He also called out young blacks who put down their educated brothers and sisters while “hanging on the corner, drinking a 40, with your pants hanging below your ass. You’re ghetto, you’re keeping it real. But you’re ignorant.”
“We dominate the world because of culture,” Lee added. “A nuclear bomb never influenced how someone talks or dresses or dances.”
Greg Mortenson, the doggedly resilient and stubborn humanitarian who channeled a failed attempt to summit K2 into two best-selling books and a career building schools and promoting girls education in Pakistan and Afghanistan — not to mention bringing the phrase “three cups of tea” into our permanent civilian and military lexicons was next to share his hard-earned insights.
“Perhaps the biggest challenge, I think, of the next generation is the fact that there are today in the world 120 million children who are not in school, who are illiterate,” Mortensen told the rapt audience, which basically treated him like the rock star he has certainly become. “Seventy-eight million of those are girls,” he added.
Championing community service as the only real way to solve poverty, his message fell on sympathetic ears as one would expect at a gathering of mainly Weber State faculty, students and alumni, and sponsored by their now-10-year-old MBA program.
As director of the Central Asia Institute (CAI), Mortenson and his team have so far built more than 165 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, helping to educate almost 70,000 girls. This despite having a mullah-inspired fatwa on his head and spending time as a prisoner in Waziristan near the Khyber Pass, where last week’s Taliban attacks took place.
Warm and thoughtful in his responses to everyone he comes into contact with, Mortenson has a huge, almost impish, full-faced smile and an endearing, often self-deprecating, sense of humor that permeates even his most hair-raising tales of survival as an infidel among Allah’s faithful.
And that brings us full circle to Mark Johnson, whose “Playing for Change” touring band knocked Park City on its collective ear, and heart, this past Saturday at the Eccles Center.
Thanks to Teri Orr and her staff at the Park City Performing Arts Foundation, opportunities surfaced over three days of student outreach, rehearsals, and post-concert gatherings to interact with Johnson and his musical missionaries in rather intimate settings.
Once again, with the Playing for Change Foundation having completed construction on six music schools in remote and underserved locales worldwide, education was the driving force behind their ecstatic mission of bringing people from varied cultures together through music. Talk to anyone who shared the extreme pleasure of their company over the weekend and you’ll, no doubt, feel the “one love, one heart.”
There were these small windows of time that appeared out of nowhere and were made profound by the likes of Spike Lee, Greg Mortenson and Mark Johnson. And those with the good fortune to enter into the auras of their respective ongoing sagas were blessed indeed.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.