Can we stop deadly heat in its tracks with ice and science?[1]
Seen on I-84 billboard advertisement for the University of Connecticut, for the
Korey Stringer Institute, College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources
Dear Classmate,
Between you and me, there spins the world as it races out of all known control.[2] Each morning, our minds awaken to a planet continually doused in storms or in flames. Our attention remains entranced, fixed to that “tape of [the] world”[3] rattling through every screen, on every phone, flashing colorful lies within virtual narratives slowly dissolving the social bonds of our community, our trust. Our own belief in ourselves. . .
Yet, as the sun begins to set over the now-quarter-millennium history of “the American experiment,” a new present emerges from the night of our common past. A single thread of time; for, dear Classmate, I write to you in the hopes that we look up from the page and meet each other’s gaze across “the standpoint of time.”[4] Hear my voice. Turn your back to the future, so that we may re-weave the threads of the past that have fallen into the peripheries of our sight.
For, in a time when the men, women, and children stuck on the margins of global society struggle to survive the policy decisions of powerful and distant leaders; in a time when the people of Hartford and greater New England brace themselves against daily immigration raids and stalling workplaces; in a time when even the “prestigious” students of the legal, medical, and engineering professions are made to sing and dance “naked in the market place,”[5] I say we can no longer think of the present as a tidy “chain of events,” but rather, we must see it as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of [our] feet.”[6]
For what has become clear, following the poet Aimé Césaire, is “not that there is no way out, but that the time has come to abandon all the old ways, which have led to fraud, tyranny, and murder.”[7] Just as my father told me the other day: “it is not the school that makes the student, but the student who makes the school.”
On the one hand, when considering the article on the Korey Stringer Institute’s work (referenced in head quote), it is important to support and shape the intellectual lives of our peers as they resolve the natural-scientific problems we collectively face. But to be clear, the article does not admit as to the role of global warming and how it might affect population overheat. On the other hand, the Institute’s promise “to keep athletes, soldiers, and laborers safe in the heat,” coupled with the recent hundred-million-dollar budget deficits imposed on the University of Connecticut health programs[8] (and the recent months of Western military intervention) point to the underside of the “Janus-faced” reality that you and I share, dear Classmate.[9]
But despair is not an option. Our class will not be held to the standard of previous classes; we will not be judged by what we bring to the table.[10] Rather, the only question in front of us is the following: what kind of world will we leave behind? Or, if you prefer it from musician Ron Ayers, “the question of the next century is not who you love, but what you love? and how it makes you feel.”[11] As the blood of Iranian and Palestinian schoolchildren continues to fall beyond our screens,[12] rather than seal ourselves off to our own time, I wish to break out of that linear “tape of the world” flattening the rhythm of our speech. To resurrect the dialogue which we have lost. Towards the light of a new science . . .
For I love nothing more than the truth. I believe that it is in my blood, this story-telling urge to make the two ends of my past and my future meet in a way that uplifts us all. And, if the writer Sylvia Wynter is correct when she says that “our ‘stories’ are as much a part of what makes us human . . . as are our bipedalism and the use of our hands,”[13] then the only way we can change the present narrative is to bring about the world where we can all see our true selves in the roles we play, our faces reflected and represented in the “systems of life”[14] that we maintain.
Together.
It is within this “horizon of humanity”[15] that we must re-imagine our collective place in the natural world; this new world we leave for the next ones that will follow “life’s longing for itself.”[16] “Only there are individuals ‘directly linked to world history’—there where dialogue has armed itself to impose its own conditions.”[17]
After all, “[i]n any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of our nature, Time occupies the key position.”[18] We must not allow ourselves to forget, “in defiance of principles [we] defend elsewhere, the history of the past 50 years, and the fact that the problem of a different organization of society has constantly been posed, not by reformers or by ideologues, but by massive collective movements, which have changed the face of the world, even if they have failed with regard to their original intentions.”[19]
Nothing has been clearer in my mind concerning the problems in Hartford—found from the lowest corners to the highest statues atop the Capitol Dome—than the face and the future of my youngest nephew, Kayden. All the world waits for him, dear Classmate, just as it awaited us.
All the technologies, unregulated; all the schools, defunded; and all the people, where do you think they will go? What will it take for the children of the world, like Kayden, to dare to break out, and leave his mark as he breathes air, to free his voice from the traps that we fall into. The traps that stifle our voices ‘til this day, possibly until we die! What will it take!? Ask yourself, what will it take for you to feel motivated again? Safe, again?
O, it is not enough to merely say no to the injustice on crystal-clear display. It is not enough to decry the acceleration of time. . . but to reverse time, to take a pause and look at one another outside of our own times. To create a new “paradigm of justice” that will include every single one of us—this should be the only work left to us now!
Only when the children of the world, like Kayden, see themselves in the curriculum presented—only then, will we see movements and changes to the history threatening to lock up and destroy our world. In fact, all generations alive on the planet have never been faced with a more daunting, yet freeing, task of seeking out “knowledge of the world as it is.”
Indeed, it has never been easy. . .but together, who knows? That our “universal” and “particular”[20] voices might blend into a symphony of “never before heard music”. . .[21]
For it is only when the laws that we sign and agree upon are made with children like Kayden’s future in mind; when his health is protected, and the treasures of his people are safeguarded by the community sworn to protect him; then and only then, dear Classmate, will we see the blossoming of future flowers. Only then can new dialogues be erected, and new dynamics established. After all, “[l]anguage produces man as man produces language.”[22]
So it is through Wynter’s “study of the Word” or ordo verborum,[23] may we encounter ourselves out of our own times. A new order of “kin-recognizing knowledge” may be possible within the groundbreaking terms of the “epistemic break Wynter envisions . . . involv[ing] an understanding of the human as a hybrid species, made up of biological as well as symbolic life, bios and mythos.”[24]
To vindicate that promise Milton made to us long ago, in the time of his own revolution, that “the law of God agrees exactly with the law of nature. . . that nothing is more consistent with the laws of nature also than that tyrants be punished.”[25]
Our children will find the new humanity for the both of us, dear Classmate. Better yet, they will build it anew, in the image of their own Creators. Because I intend to leave all the tools and love possible for children like my Kayden, so they might re-enchant their society and their institutions, redefining their work with all the vibrant colors of their virtual, Imaginary power.
And so, I must leave you here, dear Classmate. To break free from the other side of the page. To reach out and throw my voice across these words, like pebbles skipped across waves of water, so you can find me on the other side. . .
Free.
Free in the dreams of the next generation.
Free in their hopes, in their talents yet to be sung.[26]
And so, to put an end to the tragic games of man’s yesterday, or in other words, to extricate ourselves and the world from a “past [that] refuses to rest in its shallow grave,” I can do no more than offer the following prophetic words of the musician Sun Ra:
“Equation-wise, the first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended. We work on the other side of time now.”[27] (emphasis added)
You see the difficulties into which I have fallen, the position in which I am placed. I cannot, without censure, promise something about myself, nor, without equal censure, fail in what I promise. Perhaps I can invoke that saying of Job: “The spirit is in all men.” Or take consolation in what was said to Timothy: “Let no man despise your youth.” But to speak from my own conscience, I might say with greater truth that there is nothing singular about me. . . I understand that in this kind of learned contest the real victory lies in being vanquished. Even the weakest, consequently, ought not to shun them, but should seek them out, as well they may. For the one who is bested receives from his conqueror, not an injury but a benefit; he returns to his house richer than he left, that is, more learned and better armed for future contests. (emphasis added)
Pico de Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man
Signed,
Dominic Bellido
President of the Diversity Alliance for the University of Connecticut
About the Author
Having been tasked with combating racism since being elected, President of the Diversity Alliance Dominic Bellido calls upon the broader UConn community to open a dialogue and discuss the collective future of our “particular” student-body, as well as the school and higher-education’s “general” place in the today’s America.
[1] Bartucca, Julie S. 2025. “One Collapse, Countless Saves.” UConn Today, October 31.
[2] “First year law student Matthew T. Tyler said HLS has ‘lost any control over the recruiting process.’ He said firms are ‘flagrantly violating’ the guidelines, pointing to the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, & Garrison, which he said gave students a five-day acceptance window.” Pape, Sierra R., Pham, Uy B. 2026. “’Lost Control’: Harvard Affiliates Decry Accelerated Law Firm Recruiting Timelines.” Harvard Crimson, March 24.
[3] “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. ed. B.H. Edwards. Oxford World’s Classics. London, England. Oxford University Press: 2008.
[4] “The architecture of this work is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time. Ideally, the present will always contribute to the building of the future. . .it is for my own time that I should live. The future should be an edifice supported by living men. This structure is connected to the present to the extent that I consider the present in terms of something to be exceeded.” Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. trans. C.L. Markmann. London, England. Pluto Press: 1986.
[5] “[W]ith the wholesale vocationalism of higher education, predictably has come the loss of a constituency for Liberal Studies generally and the humanities in particular. They have been left naked in the marketplace.” From Sylvia Wynter’s 1984 essay The Ceremony Must Found: After Humanism, where she borrowed the phrase from Professor Christopher J. Lucas of the University of Missouri-Columbia, citing his invitational seminar on civic learning and education of the teaching profession hosted by the Hoover institution on November 11th, 1984.
[6] “This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. . . [t]he angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History, “Illuminations,” trans. H. Zohn, 1969: 249.
[7] Césaire, Aimé. Letter to Maurice Thorez. trans. C. Jeffers. Paris, France. 2010 Duke University Press; French original Presence Africaine: 1956, 150.
[8] Sokoloff, Natasha. 2025. “‘A lot of pain’: UConn preps for budget cuts and other changes amid $100 million deficit.” UConn Today, June 24.
[9] “For the ‘human sciences’ of our present order of knowledge, whose domain of inquiry is precisely that of the social reality of our present Western world-system and its nation state sub-units, have themselves to be lawlikely and rigorously elaborated of our contemporary autopoetic and sociogenically encoded, Western-bourgeois world system (Wallerstein; 1974; Wallerstein, 1980), as the first planetarily extended such system in human history. . .as academics/intellectuals of our contemporary Western world-system. . . we must necessarily function to elaborate the mode of knowledge production that is epistemologically indispensable to its replication as such a system (Althusser, 2001).” Wynter, Sylvia. The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition. ed. J.R. Ambroise, S. Broeck. Liverpool, England. Liverpool University Press: 2015, 202-03.
[10] “The self-emancipation of our time is an emancipation from the material bases of inverted truth. This ‘historic mission of establishing truth in the world’ can be carried out neither by isolated individual nor by atomized and manipulated masses, but only and always by the class that is able to dissolve all classes by reducing all power to the de-alienating form of realized democracy—to councils in which practical theory verifies itself and surveys its own actions.” DeBord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. trans. Ken Knabb. Detroit, Michigan. Black & Red: 1984, 221.
[11] Ron Ayers, “Programmed For Love.”
[12] In the words of Sartre, “[i]n this situation there is not one of us who is not totally guilty and even criminal; the Jewish blood that the Nazis shed falls on all our heads.” Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate. Trans. G. Becker. New York, New York. Schocken Books: 1995.
[13] Wynter, 217.
[14] “Puquina, Quechua, and Aymara concepts—such as that of the paqarina—are useful for understanding certain Western philosophical concepts that have been developed but have not found much concrete application, such as the concept of the ‘virtual’ in Bergson and Deleuze. The concept of paqarina, as I understand it, signifies ‘life and that which sustains life’—a notion that, in the Western world, we apply only to that which is ‘animated,’ while denying it to the mountains, the earth, the water, the rocks, and so forth. . . [t]his allows us to conceive of humanity and nature not as separate entities, but rather as engaged in a process of permanent union—or vinculum/vincularidad. . . which we might call a ‘system of life.’” (emphasis and edits added) Lajo, Javier. Qhapaq Ñan: La ruta inka de sabiduría. trans. D. Bellido. Lima, Peru. Amaro Runa-CENES: 2005, 39.
[15] “In this overall context. . . we are called upon to confront and deal with for the first time in the history of our species as Derrida’s ‘we […] in the horizon of humanity[]’ [our] ultimate predicament [as] that of the acceleratingly threatening loss of the climactic-ecological habitat conditions indispensable to our species’ survival/realization and continued performative-enactment as the uniquely autopoetically instituting, hybrid mode of living being that we are.” (emphasis and edits added) Wynter, 230.
[16] “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. . . [y]ou are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” Kahul Gibran, cited in Sousanis, Nicholas. Unflattening. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press: 2015, 139.
[17] DeBord, 221.
[18] “I have already referred to [Time’s] dual entry into our consciousness—through the sense organs which relate it to other entities of the physical world, and directly through a kind of private door into the mind. The physicist. . . naturally does not look kindly on private doors, through which all forms of superstitious fancy might enter unchecked. But is he ready to forgo that knowledge of the going on of time which has reached us through the door. . .?” (emphasis added) Eddington, Sir Arthur S. The Nature of the Physical World. University Press: 2022, 45.
[19] Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Polity Press: 1987, 98.
[20] “My conception of the universal is that of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.” Césaire, 152.
[21] John Peale Bishop, “Speaking of Poetry.”
[22] “Man does not ‘need’ language; man, in the dialectical, transitive understanding of to be is language (much like he does not need food, shelter, and so on, but is his food and house). Consciousness, realized by the [producing] meaningful sound, is self-conscious. The Self, however, is constituted fully as a speaking and hearing Self. Awareness, if we may thus designate the first stirrings of knowledge beyond the registering of tactile impressions, is fundamentally based on hearing meaningful sounds produced by self and others. If there needs to be a contest for man’s noblest sense (and there are reasons to doubt that) it should be hearing, not sight that wins. Not solitary perception but social communication is the starting point for a materialist anthropology, provided that we keep in mind that man does not ‘need’ language as a means of communication, or by extension, society as a means of survival. Man is communication and society.” Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York, New York. Columbia University Press: 1983, 162.
[23] “For the only life that we humans live is our prescriptive representations of what constitutes symbolic life (Winch, 1964), as well as what constitutes its Lack or mode of symbolic death. Consequently, because each such sociogenic replicator code of symbolic life/death functions in Gregory Bateson’s parallel terms as a ‘descriptive statement’ at the level of the individual subject’s psyche or soul, as the lawlike complement of the genetically enacted and conserved descriptive statement of the individual subject’s biological body (Bateson, 1968), then the ‘study of the Word’ as the study of the sociogenic code’s descriptive statement must necessarily not only correlate with but also determine the approach to the ‘study of nature.’” Wynter, 210.
[24] Obst, Anthony J. 2019. “Ceremony Found: Sylvia Wynter’s Hybrid Human and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” aspeers, vol. 12. https://www.aspeers.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Obst.pdf
[25] John Milton. Political Writings. Cambridge; New York. Cambridge University Press: 1991.
[26] Put another way, in the words of the also-brilliant musician Shygirl: “Come find me. . . I’m free. . . at three.” Shygirl, “TWELVE.”
[27] Sun Ra, Space is the Place.