Through the eyes of a Russian

"All good things in life come to an end." This is the first thing I remember the teacher saying near the beginning of our culture class on Monday. Lots of what he said sparked all sorts of ideas, this being the first one. My immediate response, in my head, was that you're so wrong! In fact, you couldn't be farther from the truth! And I started thinking about how great it is that I know so much, and yet so little, about life after mortality! What a great thing it is to know about the eternities and that we can be with families forever!

Before I move on, I should probably tell a little bit more about my professor (I was late to class so I didn't catch everything...including his name). He's probably in his late 50's, early 60's, even though he looks like 20 years older than dad does. He lived under the Soviet rule in Russia. I believe he taught, but what he taught, I think, was something about Economics, but once the Soviet way of things fell, he could no longer teach that way (since their economy fell as well) and so he has lived to see Russia lose 20 years as he said from about 1980-2000. He helped found and establish ANE (the university I attend). It's the ONLY thing that has been built after (from scratch) the fall of the Soviet Union that is NOT based on some sort of Soviet Union way of life/things he said.

He said that he thinks it's a good time for the university to stop and consolidate-the university has been growing at a pretty rapid pace in a short amount of time, and it worries him. He also said that China's growth worries him. The impressions I got from it were that he's afraid that if(when) they overcome their problems: poverty, lack of pension, the fact that they have no health care system established, the lack of good public education system and so on.

It was really interesting hearing things from a Russian economist who was very much brought up during the Soviet rule. He talked about Russia's problems: More than half of the students that attend universities don't really care about their education. No matter what your job is, you HAVE to get a university diploma. They don't care about the education iteslf. And he said that way too many of the universities and teachers don't care enough either. But what do you do? You can't shut down half of the universities, no one would get diplomas and no one would get jobs and it'd be the worst thing for Russia and it's people. But what do you do? There seems to be no solution to the problem at this point.

The world goes round and it'll go round no matter what I do or you do. But, it's because we do do, that we go round with it. And as we go round with it, we pick up lost pieces of this and that, his and hers, and try to fix this and that and make it better for ourselves, and those to follow.