Smile, skeptics, rouge thinkers and contrarians — it’s in vogue to question society.

College students above all seem to have a special vantage point for critiquing society — not quite a part of it, yet still immersed in it.

You would expect a man who lived through the Cold War to be a bit more rooted. But if it’s cliche college to set aside preconceived notions and rethink how society should work, Ford Burkhart feels unmistakably collegiate.

The former New York Times staffer and Pulitzer Prize winner lectured last week at the Cronkite School. But while his PowerPoint and lecture title officially addressed the finer points of good writing, he unofficially, and enthusiastically, expressing his views concerning the nation’s future.

Over a catered chicken-and-lasagna dinner before his lecture, Burkhart laid out the reasons that 2009 marks the end of the world as we know it — which, in his opinion, may not be bad.

“This is our year of going back to our roots and trying to figure out what of our patrimony is worthy,” Burkhart said.

The pillars of American society, the values our society has built upon, are falling, he said.

But Burkhart paints the future’s walls with fresh coats of optimism.

Wearing a kid-in-a-candy-shop smile, he described how the current tests to our national identity will bring great new changes, not only as a result of the Obama administration, but as a result of our transitioning society.

Not since before Nixonesque politics have we had so many problems paired with so much optimism.

In the midst of turmoil, people seem excited to turn questions into positive changes for society.

So, how will our society change?

That six-word question could fuel more than a few dissertations, but the simple answer is our ideals will change.

Our post-modern, ideologically driven society has more to do with ideas than the people who make them. Ideals, those abstract values we place at the paramount of civilization, drive society.

The idealistic — sometimes hollow — words that define who we are as a society help to move us forward: concepts like freedom, justice, prosperity or liberty.

But what if our guiding idea is wrong or misinterpreted?

Ideals, like people, aren’t always what they appear. From the bottom of a psychological mire, false ideals cause more harm than overt censorship.

The idea of security, for example, can have unintended consequences from long lines at the airport to justifying torture.

Many of the ideas America institutionalized since WWII seem to have played themselves out.

Deregulated free-market prosperity is ending — the shortsighted stewards of which proved themselves too untrustworthy.

National morals are being revisited — what wars justify involvement and for what end?

The American ideals we all learned in social studies seem to be changing.

Certainly, the shift to the Obama administration facilitates this re-evaluation, opening up our country to more scrutiny than ever permitted by former presidents. But President Obama isn’t the cause; he is an indicator, both a symbolic and realistic manifestation of the failures of old conceptions — representing the will to dispel the fog of words and re-establish our ideals.

Channing is throwing a future party and inviting the country — RSVP at
channing.turner@asu.edu.