The battle of the testers

I am back from AAAL and still am a little in shock with the confrontational nature of the conference. It is so different from CALICO. The highlight of the conference was the plenary talk by Lyle Bachman which sparked much controversy, discussion, and emotions. It was entertaining to watch all the big names in the field go up and comment/ask questions/express their disagreement/etc. The following few colloquia and plenary talks appeared to all have implicit and explicit commentary in response to Lyle Bachman's talk. It was entertaining. The basic issue was the question of whether or not what we do has real-world impact and whether or not it is needed. Bachman's position was we need it and we do not have it. Those that do a lot of activitist work were offended by his general statement that applied linguists ignore the impact they could have. And I bet some of the people who do more laboratory or theory-building research were frustrated with the devalueing and disrepsecting of their research. Others were frustrated by his general call for activism since not all fields within applied linguistics lend themselves equally for such work, and furthermore such work does not have an adequate support structure in the profession.
Personally, I thought it was timely to say that all people in all kinds of professions need to think about how they can make a difference in their communities. It's just a matter of defining what community means and how big difference has to be before it can be considered difference. I have three big ideas that could have an impact on the community, but I am not sure how my insititutional structure and my status at the institution goes with my crazy ideas.