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Note from Jan Anderson: Sherm Washburn has been in four of my literature classes in the last two years. Last term in Eng 107 World Literature, the class, composed mostly of students in their teens, 20s, and 30s, began to examine the purpose of literature. Why bother with it when there are so many other demands on our time? One student offered that the protagonists we were studying, such as Job, Gilgamesh, Lysistrata, and Socrates, become models for our own attitudes and behavior. As our oldest class member (he is now 83), Sherm opined that what these great figures had in common was their ability to cope with their situations, a trait he saw as an important ingredient in our self-image. We need to see ourselves as capable, resourceful, and heroic, he said. One of Sherm's heroes is his wife of 53 years, Evelyn, who inspired his letter to young students. | |
| 8 October 1999 | |
| 1 | Dear Jan and her students: |
| 2 | During a class discussion last year, you asked me why we studied English. My reply was: "To learn to communicate. That's why we go to school." |
| 3 | I've been thinking about it a lot, since then, and now think I gave you only a partial answer. My wife expressed a more complete answer years ago when she said: "In life, the most important thing we can learn is how to cope!" What does my wife know about coping? A lot! |
| 4 | She went to nursing school during the Depression when student nurses were paid four dollars per month! She graduated after three years, and wore the neat, white uniforms and caps that enabled patients to tell the nurses from the cleaning personnel . . .hardly the mode which we see in today's hospitals. |
| 5 | World War II had broken out and she joined the Navy Nurse Corps. The need was so great, the Navy flew her to Hawaii in one of those huge Pan American flying boats. As a Navy nurse, she had to cope with seeing the flower of American youth—they were the same age then that you are now—with their stubs of arms, and legs, their mutilated bodies, their blasted minds, their blinded eyes. Surviving marines and sailors not wounded . . . were stricken with tropical diseases. |
| 6 | She tells me that one of the most difficult situations during those days was when she had to help a young marine write a letter to his mother. He wanted his mother to know that he was alive, and back in Hawaii, but he didn't want to tell her that he was now totally blind. |
| 7 | Near the end of the war, the nurses who had been captured by the Japanese with the fall of Bataan came back to the United States through her hospital. She had a chance to talk with them. Just one example of coping is the way those nurses coped with their impending capture. They knew the Japanese would take away their watches, bracelets, jewelry . . .but did their captors have to get all of the jewelry? Some of the nurses hid their rings and other small items in their jars of cold cream, which, fortunately, the Japanese let them keep. |
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| 9 | On the page on which all three of the above definitions appear, is the explanation that the word is from the Old French "to strike a blow," and that is the tip-off that coping will not be easy. It takes individual effort! Nobody can do it for you. You have to cope for yourself! |
| 10 | And you are doing it! The fact that you are in this classroom shows that you are coping! |
| 11 | A part of coping is learning the tools, skills, and techniques that will enable you to cope, and communication is a part of that. No matter how great the ideas are that you may have, of what value are they if you cannot communicate them? Therefore, you study English that you might better communicate....to enable you to cope. |
| 12 | That first definition of cope has an important qualifier: "to fight or contend with successfully." How do you contend with your problems? Successfully? How would you cope with the problem if you went out to the parking lot just now and found you had a flat tire? Would you sit on a front fender and cry until some one eventually came to your aid? Would you take out your rage and frustrations by beating the old heap with a sledge hammer? Or would you take the easy way out, find a telephone and call "dear old Dad"? |
| 13 | He'd probably take the easy way out (for him) and call Triple A... or, he'd suggest you do that. Or, just maybe during your driver training, you were taught how to change a tire...women have been known to do that. Regardless of the method used, you will have coped with the problem and your own conscience will tell you how well you have coped...how successfully you have coped. |
| 14 | All things are possible for you in this room. Do you know why? |
| 15 | Because you are young! A well-known cynic once stated that youth was so wonderful "it's a pity to waste it on the young." But it isn't wasted. I was appalled when I took a course in poetry and students devoted much of their time to poems about death! I asked them why. They responded, "Oh, life is so rough! You don't know how dangerous it is out there!" I think their problem was that they weren't coping. |
| 16 | Remember, there is help out there. Look for it. There's nothing wrong in accepting help. I had to borrow money to get through college. And those college years are probably some of the most wonderful years of my life...and they will be of yours if you become involved in really coping. |
| 17 | In effect, that's what we are studying here, how Gilgamesh, Odysseus and all who follow them....COPED! Sincerely, Lt. Col. Sherman Washburn, U.S. Army, retired
Nominated by Jan Anderson, Writing Instructor
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