My colleague Scott Sernau has been posting every few days at the American Democracy Project site about his life and work aboard the MV Explorer, the floating university of the Semester at Sea program. Another faculty member, Janet Eastman, a staff writer for the LA Times, is also blogging about the voyage, as are a number of students.
We're into multiple uses of good writing over at the Democracy site, so I've been editing some of the highlights of Scott's pieces for republication at our local paper. As I read and reread the pieces, I find an increasingly undeniable sense of North American luxury -- for many of us here, our view of the world is so partial, so protected, so misleading. The luxury we live in begins to seem like an ethical trap, and we have fallen quite a long distance into it, I fear.
The different blogs from the Semester at Sea writers look at first glance like they are isolated from each other. I wonder what would happen to the ethical themes of Scott's pieces if they rippled through the blogs of his students? Or vice versa...