A retention of faith

What does it mean to retain one's faith? Is it faith in oneself? in your community? in society? in others? in a deity of some sort? Do we have to have faith and trust in ourselves before we have it in our communities? Or is it the other way around? Might we not have faith in ourselves if we see no examples of it around us?

Following the election, I am troubled by what is a gradual unfolding of that faith in my country, in institutions that are supposed to be motivated by justice and common good instead of by avarice and personal vengeance. If this country is only about greed and selfishness, then I gradually find myself at odds with it, a stranger floating adrift among other strangers. And if I find community among strangers, how do you re-form (or reform) a community on the basis of beliefs you all thought everyone shared?

Does that crisis of faith in some abstract type of thing - a country as a concept - trickle down into other abstract notions like society? Does it trickle down into things of substance like communities or the people at the grocery store? to my students? to my family?

There are the communities I live in - in New Haven, in Buffalo, among faculty and students at UB, among friend groups in different parts of the world, among family. I have needed to touch each community to check again and again if they remain intact, clinging onto the fabric for a bit asking "Do you also still believe in kindness? in noble pursuits?"

And if selfishness abounds while knowledge languishes at the margins, I find myself struggling against so much lost hope. Do I believe that students are fundamentally interested in learning still? Do I believe that I can do anything to prevent academic dishonesty in a world of easy AI answers? Should I even bother trying? Do I believe that work in my research and my field is worth pursuing while universities, institutions, and society (that diaphanous term) might flippantly dismiss such endeavors as wasteful or impractical? Why does it feel like my careful little efforts are like planting trees in a forest fire?

Or does the despair and lack of faith only trickle up? Does the individual losing faith become nothing but a black hole sucking all others into their vortex? Is this the nature of where faith goes? And as communities become lost to these cults of individualism, what is left to hold onto?

Research

Did you discuss your project proposal? Have you talked about it with colleagues? Have you revised it? Have you mulled it over in the shower, on your walk, in the wee hours of the morning?

Have you requested funding from a grant source? Did it take you 1-2 months to write a proposal and work with your university to submit all the paperwork in time? Did you wait 6 months to hear back about whether you got funded? If you did get funded, did you wait another 3 months to start the research?

Did you write up your protocol for the institutional review board at your university (if the work involves human subjects)? Did you have to revise this? Did it take you 3-4 weeks and did you pull your hair out trying to answer their questions?

Once you had the research funds, did you train students as research assistants? did you design experiments and run them? Have you finished collecting all your data? Did you stay late at the university again doing so?

Did you spend 6-9 months analyzing and re-analyzing your data, plotting your findings, doing statistics? Did you present these new findings at research conferences that you submitted to and then attended? Did your university not give you enough funds to attend the conference? Have you incorporated feedback from your colleagues now that you have findings?

Have you written up your results in a research paper and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal? Have you read the 10, 20, 30, 40 relevant articles that you cite in your background section? Are your findings well argued?

Did you wait 3-4 months to hear back from the journal? If the journal's decision was "revise and resubmit" or "major revisions", did you spend 2-3 months revising your manuscript to address the reviewers' concerns? Did you pull your hair out doing this too?

Did you repeat this process above to revise it yet again? Did the journal give you reviewers that advised you to do more than last time? Do you have any hair left?

If your paper was accepted after the 9-12 months for journal submission, review, and revision, did you also address all copyeditor commentary?

If this all has happened, congratulations, you have published an original piece of research. It took you 2-3 years and a huge amount of effort. Hopefully you can continue to do this on your grant.

Now, remind me, what was that again about your google "research" that you spent 30 minutes on?