I need context!

As part of my first blog I wanted to offer up a small anecdote as a foundation for my comments on the Bush article. For several years I directed the Florida Statistical Analysis Center in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and was responsible for all things planning, policy or research. More specifically, my position was situated in the Criminal Justice Executive Institute. I handled publications for the Institute and supervised the student research projects that were part of our Senior Leadership Program.

During one session of the Senior Leadership Program both students and staff completed the Myers-Briggs assessment to find our personality types. We received our results and then the evaluator organized us by type. Everyone else in the room – all of the law enforcement and corrections officers and all of the other staff – sat at one table while I sat, by myself, on the opposite side of the room.

Afterwards I had a conversation with my supervisor, who was a good friend (and is now also a PhD but still their type and not my personality type). He told me the results were not all that surprising to him, and they explained a lot about my frustrations relative to the research project. “Research,” he said, “just isn’t part of their make-up. They are used to ‘here’s the bullet, here’s the gun, here’s how the bullet goes into the gun, here’s how you make a bullet come out of the gun.’ And what you want to talk about is ‘under what circumstances might it be appropriate to use a weapon?’”

Situation and circumstances, then, that’s me. What does that mean for As We May Think?

Bush’s article was published in the July 1945 edition of The Atlantic. We read this piece with knowledge of the Manhattan Project and the bombing of Japan and the ensuing arms race and the threat of nuclear war. But As We May Think would have been written shortly after Truman’s first briefing on the Manhattan Project (April 24, 1945). The magazine would have arrived in the hands of the public before the first test of that “strange destructive gadget,” the atomic bomb (Trinity, July 16, 1945), before Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and before Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). In this context, Bush would not be apologizing or reflecting on the impact of these events. He would not be asking us to move past them and on to new horizons. Bush would be anticipating the future and preparing the rest of us, explaining what ”good” could and would come out of the scientific partnerships that had been created, even as these partnerships would soon result in the loss of life, in the massive destruction of property, in the end of the war. Knowing this causes me to read the article with a new and different perspective.