Dawn of the Unthinkable by James Concannon Page A

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thousands of pieces each month and probably just threw them out if
they didn’t recognize the name. Would they be foolish enough to
throw out one that might be the solution to all life’s problems?
The thought that he could come up with a workable plan
amused him, and he shook his head and said, “Why not?”.

Chapter 9
    Wayne Cunningham looked into the sea of
uninterested faces and hoped to see a spark. He realized that
Politics and Policy 101 was a requirement for many of these
students, and for that reason was just a class that they just
wanted to get over and forget about.
    As a professor it was hard to make things
that were life and death to him appear exciting to business or
anthropology students that didn’t experience the same reality. As a
black man the things that he was teaching had allowed him to rise
to the position he was in—a full professor at a large urban
university. The majority of these kids were interested in one
future thing: making money. Because they did not see his class as a
vehicle for them to learn any secrets toward reaching that goal,
they considered it a complete waste of time and gave it as little
attention as they could get away with. He sighed and thought. If
they only realized that the underpinnings of practically everything
of importance that went on could be traced back to somebody’s
politics, they might actually be effective right from
graduation . As it was, most of these children would spin their
wheels for about ten years before they figured out how to be a
player. By that time, they would have been handed their head or
backstabbed about a dozen times by more experienced, political
practitioners. He wondered if maybe then, something he had
taught them might come back to them and be of use.
    That was why he had gotten into teaching in
the first place. As an early learner, he had stuck out from the
rest of his inner-city crowd in elementary school and throughout
the rest of his school years. He finished books and assignments
well before the rest of his class and was eventually skipped ahead
two grades. In college he took a double major, political science
and sociology, feeling that politics ran the institutions he cared
about but people made the politics, and he wanted to know both. He
had raced through his master’s and doctoral degrees as there was
always someone looking to give an academically gifted black man
scholarship money. He wasn’t particularly proud that the system
reacted with surprise when someone from his background made it to
the top academically; he just took advantage of it. And when the
community leaders came looking for him to step forward for elective
office, he declined, telling them that someone like himself could
have more impact teaching others, helping develop their minds, and
multiplying the effect of his having “made it.”
    But here he sat in front of a class of bored
freshmen who wanted no parts of him or his dusty theories. At least
that’s what they thought of his analysis of the Cold War breakdown
and the effect of European Unification. He had sat in on some of
the classes of more senior professors and watched with excitement
as their students engaged them in intellectual battles over more
mundane treaties and little known bureaucrats. This was where he
wanted to be; these were the minds that he wanted to influence. The
only problem was that tenured senior professors tended to never
retire, only having to teach maybe two courses a semester and
having graduate students grade the tests. It was a cushy job, and
he would be long in the tooth before he got a crack at those
fertile minds. He was starting to consider going back to the
community leaders and seeing what might be available to run for,
but he knew full well from what he had studied how much of his soul
he would have to sell to do that. Poor fools had to spend more time
raising money than actually helping anyone. That has to
suck, he thought.
    Besides, he wasn’t sure he had