Cluelessness Reigns in Academia’s Ivory Towers


I: The Surety of the Young


I.A. We’re all headed into a future of unknowns. Well, not all of us. College students know precisely what the future holds as they take their cues from clueless adults. Gotta hand it to them: At least they think they know.


I.B. Parochialism at Halloween in 2023 wears the mask of Cosmopolitanism. But be assured, beneath the costume, it is just a young person who’s wearing an outfit that adults provided. As a result, the causes supported by the young can become the curses of their old age. Proof of this lies in the many hopeful revolutionaries who succumbed to worse dictatorships than those they overthrew (e.g., The Russian Revolution and the rise of murderous Stalin and the loss of freedom under the Soviet Union).


I.C. All of us have undertaken a personal journey from naive parochialism to relative cosmopolitanism.


II: Parochialism


II.A. As a young teenager in a small western Pennsylvania town, I was largely unaware of world politics and national current events and the potential of both to affect my life. But I had inklings: I was fortunate enough to live in a public school district with a curriculum that included civics, geography, and world history, so my parochialism did not exist in a vacuum of personal centrism. And the Cold War with its ever-looming possibility of a nuclear conflict always surfaced itself when I walked past the town’s more substantial buildings, each with a posted yellow and black “Fallout Shelter” sign over some basement entrance. Those signs, some 1.4 million of them spread throughout the country, plus occasional school bomb drills during which we had to get under a desk or into a hallway away from windows, meant the outside world wasn’t very far away. The drills temporarily introduced a weak cosmopolitanism that faded into my young mind’s recesses as homework, sports, and social activities occupied that teenage brain. Could anything have been more important than the Pirates getting into and beating the Yankees in the World Series, clarinet lessons, football or baseball practice and games, school dances, and those carefree summers at Mountain View’s giant oval pool I spent with friends? Ah! Those female classmates lounging by the pool or playing Marco Polo or totem-pole wrestling with us boys in the water. Sorry; reverie afflicts all of us with attention deficit disorder. What was I...


Back to…


II.B. In my later teenage years I was fortunate to attend a private school with a student body hailing from around the country, giving me a sense that the world was larger and my connection to it was more adhesive than I had previously thought. I would have discovered this as I aged, but the nature of that student body thrust cosmopolitanism into my cortex. Brighter than I, my classmates engaged one another and me in numerous debates about social and world matters that challenged my parochialism and taught me that no society is the center and that every society in a world of nuclear weapons and mobile populations is connected.


III. Transitions


III.A. Increasing self-awareness is the avenue into psychological maturity; increasing other-awareness is the avenue to social maturity. Both avenues snake aimlessly in the absence of specific knowledge because few of us can plan a direct route to maturation. We live; things happen; we learn in retrospect. And because the maze of life keeps changing unpredictably, our travel on both avenues has its surprises, elations, and disappointments.


III.B. During my late teen travels on the relatively clueless path to social awareness, I became an advocate of sorts. For example, I sent in my dollar to become a dues-paying member of the NAACP, which, at that time, was not a mouthpiece for the Democrat Party, but was more a mouthpiece for oppressed African-Americans robbed of freedoms and rights by mostly southern Democrats and also by hiring agents in numerous businesses run by staunch Republicans in a world controlled by Caucasian managers.


III.C. Lacking specific knowledge about the complex relationships between Americans of different races and the need for personal responsibility, I adopted a rather simple position that would eventually see me advocate for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The economic and social plight of Black America had become a cause. I had contributed a dollar!


IV. Wakeup Calls and the Inevitability of Disillusionment


IV.A. Probably the loudest wakeup call and point of no return to those happy transition days between the bliss of ignorance by the Mountain View pool and a budding cosmopolitan reality occurred over a short period known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Before that incident, the possibility of a nuclear war seemed remote even in the presence of those fallout signs. But a very real possibility of a nuclear war meant I was inescapably part of a world system whether or not I wanted to think about other countries. In fact, it forced me to think about them and my own helpless vulnerability. There were others in control, and I had no way to influence their spur of the moment and self-aggrandizing decisions. Both Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy had their fingers on buttons only they could push.


IV.B. There was also that back-of-the-mind reality that though the United States through the efforts of my Marine father and his generation had won its battles against the Axis Powers in WWII, the country had fought a stalemate campaign in Korea and had failed miserably in supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion.


IV.C. In a very short while, the War on Poverty in the Great Society initiated an insidious deleterious effect: Hard-working African-American families struggling to succeed in the unaccommodating worlds of education, business, and industry began to decline in numbers as more welfare became available. The number of fatherless children born to those families at the start of the Great Society was 35-40%. That percent increased steadily and rapidly through the ensuing decades till it reached today’s 65-67%, an increase that coincided with the rise in drug use, gang membership, and violent crimes by teenagers of all races, but that affected negatively the lives of proportionately more Black teens.


IV.D. Too young to remember the American-Japanese internment during WWII and too far removed from wars with Native Americans in the nineteenth century, I and my contemporaries had another wakeup in the riots, stand-ins, and Kent State shootings of the 1960s and 70s. Was the American government the same as those distant governments I was becoming more aware of during my transition period from parochialism to cosmopolitanism? Could the American government turn against the people who elected it just as the Soviet Union’s tyrants turned on Russians? Are the FBI memo directing agents to spy on traditional Catholics and the Attorney General’s call to monitor parents protesting at school board meetings indications that the American government is little different from those censoring governments I had learned of during my transition period?    


IV.E. Those failures to achieve a definitive victory in the war on poverty, the war in Korea and the subsequent loss of more than 50,000 American soldiers in the debacle of Vietnam during a time when my dollar dues to the NCAAP did little to alter the status of Americans all added to a sense of personal vulnerability shared with me by many Americans, a vulnerability that the Arab oil embargo and several economic downturns further exacerbated in my early adulthood a background disillusionment sprung from a realization that the local and the distal were not only related, but were also alike.   


V. Overcoming Parochialism


V.A. “There is no frigate like a book,” wrote Emily Dickinson. Speak of insularity! With a life lived mostly in her Amherst home and Mt. Holyoke school, Emily was about as removed from world affairs as any teen in my youth. But that one line from one of her little poems was probably as valuable a lesson in international affairs as any. With my limited resources and travel experiences, I realized I could travel virtually. So, I developed rather eclectic reading interests. What was “out there?” What didn’t I know?


V.B. I stumbled on a book about the Maya in the school library one day. The Maya? Why hadn’t I heard of this civilization when I took those history classes in my teen years? How could an entire civilization have come and gone without any section devoted to it in my textbooks. I knew about the Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, the Eastern and Western Roman empires, the Holy Roman Empire, the British Empire, but noting about a Central American Empire other than the Aztecs. I had as a young student heard of the Aztecs and knew the Marine song’s reference in the words “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” but I never heard about this extensive civilization that had come and gone before the Conquistadores had a chance to destroy them. I don’t remember the book’s author or even its title; I recall the author was an archaeologist. But I know that in reading it, I realized that our species was pretty much the same regardless of time and place: We were no different in our ostensible accomplishments and our insidious threats both domestic and foreign. Those pyramids were fascinating structures that rivaled those at Giza and gave evidence of a highly organized and rather sophisticated (if one ignores the absence of the wheel and the human sacrifices) society. That civilization lost for centuries in the rainforests of Central America most likely mirrored modern civilization’s foibles domestic and foreign. If a civilization that complex had risen and fallen, could my own civilization also fall? Could the causes adopted by today’s youth be as inimical as those of civilizations long gone? Is the modern world—my modern world—destined to follow the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Incan, Mayan, and Aztec worlds in falling? And if so, would the fall occur because of inside or outside forces, the former a slow decay and the latter a brutish nuclear war?


V.C. Apparently, some of today’s college students—in places like Cornell, Harvard, and NYU—have taken up the banner of the Palestinians. They have rallied round a cause, one they have simplified into the “evil, apartheid Israelis” and the “oppressed and abused Palestinians.” In adopting this cause, many have denied the realities of beheaded babies, raped and tortured women, and slaughtered men in a massacre that Hamas has itself documented and displayed. But no matter. The ardent anti-semitic protestors believe they have a handle on cosmopolitanism, that they have an encompassing view of the world that separates the oppressor and the oppressed. They know. At least, they think they know.


V.D. But what if, years hence, the very people they support and whose actions they justify through equivocation decide that just because they are Americans, they deserve to die? What if the very organization they now call “freedom fighters” focuses on what they designate as the Great Satan? What if the cause they now support causes them problems they can’t anticipate in their naïveté and closed-mindedness?


VI. Backfires of the Vanities


VI.A. The Great Society I supported in my youth has turned into a socialist nightmare that has cost about 15 trillion dollars with no end in sight. Since 1964, the poverty rate hasn’t changed much. The War on Poverty, a noble cause in my youth, has become an endless war with many casualties, among them the Black youth who grew up fatherless in inner cities. The vanity of the Johnson Administration in assuming that a mere expenditure of tax dollars could solve the problem reveals itself in its failure. But in my youth I believed I knew the future and that my generation could shape it as we willed.


VI.B. The support of the young for Hamas and Palestinians and against Israelis and Jews around the world is destined to become their future disillusionment. They will learn their cosmopolitanism the hard way: In some terrorist attack in which they become a target or collateral damage, or in a tribal society not much different from the most culturally disjointed groups in history and in those tribal units currently squabbling, fighting, and killing one another. Whereas the extent of such fighting was limited to specific regions during ancient and medieval times, that fighting will now become more cosmopolitan, and its victims will be more widespread.


VI.C. We humans have difficulty living harmoniously in our local “parishes.” On a cosmopolitan scale, we find harmony even more difficult to achieve and maintain. Adopting any cause isn’t a guarantee that its promise will end in some utopian society; those college students who are “Christian, white, and middle to upper class” and who are out condemning Israel for defending itself might find some day that they are the target of terrorists simply because they are “Christian, white, and middle to upper class.” We learn in retrospect because we live, and stuff happens, and most of the stuff that happens occurs because of those who live outside our sphere of influence, outside our local "parish." We can adopt causes we believe to be worthy, but we cannot predict their consequences. Our vanity often backfires, especially the vanity of youth sure of themselves but lacking in a true cosmopolitanism.

VII. Conclusion

VII.A. Just sayin'
​
VII.B. What do you say?

A researcher from Columbia University’s Advance Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity engages Columbia faculty and students just back from a protest against Israel. * Voices come from audience members. (Passages in quotation marks and italics derive from the consortium’s website **)


Researcher: First, everyone should know that “Research has shown that about one in every twenty conflicts – five percent – becomes stuck and seemingly unresolvable.”


Voices: Thanks for the math lesson. Who in college nowadays would know that one in twenty is five percent? We’ve been busy learning more important matters like how socialism is great, Republicans are racists, Jews imprison Palestinians and kill them, and America is an imperialistic Satan oppressing the poor around the world as it takes their economic resources. It’s all about oil. It’s all about oil. It’s all…


Researcher: Okay. I understand you’re angry. But…


Voices: Gas the Jews!


Researcher: Hold on, now. This is a university. Let’s settle our differences peacefully. We here at what we like to call our “Sustaining Peace Project” offer “a paradigm shift in the study of peace and conflict dynamics.” We believe we can resolve conflicts like the long-standing one between Arabs and Jews that go back as far as 2,500 years or so, like conflicts between Persians and Jews, Egyptians and Jews, Assyrians and Jews, the Sea People and Jews, Romans and Jews, Christians and Jews, Germans and Jews, and…


Voices: Don’t you see. They can’t get along with anyone. What’s the one common name in your list of conflicting parties? It’s Jews. Free the Palestinians. Free the Palestinians. Free the…


Researcher: Look, we’re not going to get anywhere just shouting. You students who aren’t on scholarships of some kind are paying more than $63,000 per year for tuition—or your parents are paying it. If you do the math, that’s going to add up to…


Voices: More math? That’s what you want to tell us? More math…Free the Palestinians.


Researcher: …more than a quarter million dollars—more if you take five or six years to graduate and even more for a graduate degree. Anyway, our diverse faculty members here at Columbia’s Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity want you to avail yourselves of our innovative ways to resolve conflict. Just shouting doesn’t resolve anything.


Voices: Gas the Jews. Free the Palestinians.


Researcher: “Our research takes a different approach and employs new models – based on complexity science, systems thinking, causal loop diagramming, and Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) – to engage and think anew about the complexity of peace, conflict and sustainability.”


Voices: Stop the genocide. Stop the genocide. Support Hamas. Support the Palestinians.


Researcher: Here at Columbia, we have a diverse faculty, staff, and student body. That means we have an obligation to get along peacefully, to set an example for the rest of the world. We know that “Few efforts have been devoted to studying peace directly as a positive state. In addition, research and practice relevant to peace are typically rooted in specific disciplines while interdisciplinary approaches are limited. As a result, the complexity, multidimensionality, dynamism, and sustainability of peace are not well understood, contributing to a lack of coherent, measurable, and implementable policy agendas that effectively sustain peace.”


Voices: Multidimensionality…? Is this a physics class? We heard about many dimensions in that physics class you made us take. Throw the Jews off campus. Don’t take donor money from Jews. Stop supporting Israel. Divest…


Researcher: Could we just listen for a moment. Look we have a diverse group here at the Advance Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity. Look at us members on stage: Naseem Aumeerally, Tatiana Benavides, Allegra Chen-Carrel, Peter Coleman, John Fisher, Doug Fry, Larry Liebovitch, and Genevieve Souillac. Are we not diverse? Do we not have differences in personal histories, cultural backgrounds, specializations, and political views? Of course we do, but we constantly “bridge the gap between the academic understanding and practical applications of sustainable peace by providing policy-relevant tools.” If we have found the way to peace among ourselves, we believe you can, also. “Our Sustainable Peace Project, grounded in dynamical systems theory and informed by historical and anthropological evidence indicating that humans are fundamentally cooperative beings seeks to” get people to converse about peace with “academic experts, policy makers, and local stakeholders.” We have classes and research projects. We do research. We have…


Voices: Free the Palestinians. Free the Palestinians. Stop the genocide. Support Hamas. Divest in anything the Israelis offer. Gas the Jews. Free the…


Researcher: If you would just give our Dynamical Systems Theory a chance…


*https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/columbia-nyc-campus-access-restricted-to-id-holders-ahead-of-thursday-protests/4764325/


**https://ac4.climate.columbia.edu/sp

I watched an old man walk today
Upon a beach near Delaware Bay.
And as he went, he put feet down
As though he wore the shoes a clown
Would put upon his feet, quite large
Like some Bay boat, just say a barge.
Lifting one and then the other,
He slapped his feet like my grandmother.
Ataxia gives a slapping gait,
As if he hauled the world’s great weight.
The walk reveals some inner flaw.
Was he distracted by Fatah?
Proprioceptive he is not
As demonstrated by his thought,
“Where am I now?” he seems to ask.
Directing him is quite a task.
He shakes the hands of those not there,
And cannot manage an airplane’s stair.
But my concern’s not slap-foot walking;
I worry more when he is talking.


The cerebellum plays a part
In walking upright from the start.
A toddler toddles to teach his brain,
How to ascend into a plane.
But in old age, that task grows hard
Even for an old lifeguard.


The Press won’t note that something’s wrong
And each report will play along
As though the man is quite astute
Will no one say? Are they quite mute?
Are young reporters so enamored
They cannot hear as he has stammered?
Can no one see his wayward path
As ‘round the world a great bloodbath
Has taken many lives for real
With many wounds that cannot heal?


His footsteps wander on the beach
The evidence that won’t impeach,
For many people do the same
Ataxia might be to blame.
But what of policies that are so lame
That while he goes this way or that
Without insight, some bureaucrat
Is telling him which way to walk,
Or where to stand and how to talk?
What if the man is not in charge
And someone else our plights enlarge?
The border, drugs, the threats abroad,
All while he stoops, “Pelecypod!
“Just Look, my wife, what I have found
“Just lying on this sandy ground.
“I never saw one here before,
“How did it come to wash ashore?”


“But Joey, Dear, look in our house;
“You pick one up and each time grouse,
“‘Why do we have this stuff assembled?’
“‘There is not room for other stuff,
“‘Like documents,’ you say and huff.”


And then he turns and walks away
Befuddled now, filled with dismay,
A wandering path along the beach
Ataxia walking, halting speech.
“Joe,’ she says, “Our home’s this way;
“We’ll come again another day.
“And you can shuffle on the sand,
“To find a shell within the strand.”


“So, are there more?” he now inquires.
She says, “Yes, Dear.” She never tires
Of leading him lest he fall down
His bare feet slapping like a clown.
    

Unintended or Intended Complicity? Evil at Work? Simple Ignorance?


The New York Times reported that Israel bombed a hospital in Gaza. So eager to run with their narrative, the editors never fact-checked the story, but took it as Hamas told the tale. Hamas, mind you, an organization bent on genocide and the perpetrator of the massacre in Israel, said that Israelis were responsible. Now there’s a reliable source of information for the purported newspaper par excellence, the Preeminent Gray Lady.


The Gray Lady as the center of newspaperdom can no longer be trusted. She’s so agenda-ridden that her news is tainted by association with a number of false stories. She is now a rag whose intent isn’t objective reporting, but a careless pursuit of an agenda, a largely liberal agenda that, for example, could not accept the Hunter laptop as a reality and won’t accept that there’s something worth investigating in the Biden finance network. That the paper’s editors echoed the Russian disinformation explanation and the Russian collusion stories is a clue to their bias and incompetence. The predetermined narrative runs their stories, not in-depth research and reporting.


And now, the Gray Lady can be accused of complicity in a worldwide antisemitism that will, if it has not already, threaten American Jews everywhere, including on college campuses.


Consciously or Unconsciously Complicit in Evil?


But the paper has not just lost its veneer of sophistication and reliability, the Gray Lady has now also become complicit in actual civil unrest, property damage, rage, and injury and death. Its Hamas-driven story of the hospital bombing has further inflamed the antisemitism that we see in the streets of major cities, including New York. The paper’s inflammatory false tale has exacerbated the worsening relations between those who were marginal antisemites and Jews all over the world. The rush-to-press falsehood feeds an angry Arab world, neo-Nazis, and those college students woefully lacking in knowledge because of liberal, socialist, and Marxist professors who foster hate both subtly and overtly.


Ineffective Late Retractions Can’t Erase the Damage: It’s Too Little, Too Late


So, the paper has now apologized for the erroneous reporting.


Here’s a passage: “Given the sensitive nature of the news during a widening conflict and the prominent promotion it received, Times [sic.] editors should have taken more care with the initial presentation, and been more explicit about what information could be verified.” The editors follow this with a promise to review their procedures.   


Is there any way to know whether or not the retraction has altered the minds of those who already marched against Israel and for Hamas in part motivated by the false story? Is there a NY Times reporter pursuing Rashida Harbi Tlaib, the congresswoman who incited a crowd to chant its hatred of Israel, to tell her that she was wrong and that it was Hamas that bombed the hospital? To ask her to retract a claim derived from false reporting? Did the Times try to convince her that the casualties at the hospital were also exaggerated?


Once moved, once moving, the mob is hard to stop. The Gray Lady must not understand the principle of inertia. Certainly, she hasn’t applied an equal force to halt the movement.


As Forrest Gump’s Mother Says, “Stupid Is As Stupid Does”


No, the NY Times unleashed the hatred and exacerbated the tensions. Good work, editors. Are any of the paper’s employees Jewish? Did you potentially incite someone in those crowds of marchers who believed your story to seek revenge on one of your staff? Stupid is as stupid does. Coupled with evil, stupid makes the Gray Lady complicit in damage and harm. 



https://www.jpost.com/international/article-769779

Residents of Bishton, Wales, live in one of those villages that could well serve as a film location for the TV series Midsomer Murders. Their community lies in farmland, has a history associated with a Welsh uprising against English rule, is the site of an attack by Henry V’s forces, is named Bishton for “Bishop’s Town,” and has an small old stone church with a tetrangular bell tower entrance. Quaint by my standards, and I live in a rural community with two old (1850s) stone churches (one Episcopalian, thus “Anglican,” and the other Roman Catholic: Historic Register type churches, the latter commemorating the site of the Mass a French priest offered as the troops were off chasing George Washington at Fort Necessity—whew! Just had to give that digression)


Anyway some, if not all, of Bishton’s residents are saying, “Not in my backyard,” thus, Nimby or Nimbies, to a solar energy project that would cover more than 300 of their rural acres with grey panels. * The arguments for and against the project separate those who see Bishton as a convenient place for the panels because of its location near the grid and those who don’t want their somewhat picturesque community spoiled by the blanket of modern technology. Those who want to cover the ground argue that in forty years it will be returned to a pre-farming condition, that is, with enhanced soils not depleted of nutrients and with wildlife in abundance. The total property for the project covers more than 500 acres, with about 130 of them “planted in wildflowers.” Nimbies, in contrast, don’t want to wait forty years on the odd chance that those predicting the future will, with the Nimbies themselves, be dead or too old to wander the once pleasantly-rural scenery. The latter do have a point, don’t they.


Forty Years from Now: Promises Never Kept


You can imagine the future—four decades hence: Useless and broken solar panels perched on 500,000 rusting legs, all subject to vandalism by young people on drugs and alcohol and no public authority with the money to dismantle and reclaim. The world gone off green energy as an inefficient mechanism by comparison with fossil fuels, the future looks bleak for Bishton as it will fall into decay and declining population, almost, if not completely, returning to its condition post Welsh-English fifteenth-century war during the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V, who sequentially and successfully fought the forces of Owain Glyndŵr, the last Welshman to claim the title of Prince of Wales.


And in the interim 40-year period, how will the people of Bishton profit from the field of solar panels? Well, that green power is going into the grid, not into the local community. That is, of course, the problem with all large power-generating plants. They produce energy for use outside there local environs.


But, of course, the same can be said for coal, oil, and natural gas power plants. Most of them feed into the general grid for a region. The locals see the production facilities; people far away simply turn on the lights. Ah! The dilemmas of modern civilization coupled with ever-larger populations and energy demands make us reveal our true feelings about the Green Revolution.


And as it happens in natural trophic environments where the exit of one species can precede the entrance of another, those Bishton residents who die or move away will be replaced by people of a different history and character. The replacements will move into a community with a solar field out their windows. They will move there either by opportunity or necessity. Some will see deteriorating homes as a cheap refuge in an inflationary economy; others will see a village in decline as their only refuge, possibly years from now the site of public housing. But that’s all a rather pessimistic view. There is the slight chance that someone, some company, some government agency will actually do what is now just a promise.


Nimbies Everywhere, Many of Them Hypocrites


The recent rejection of immigrants flown onto Martha’s Vineyard parallels the Koch and Kennedy families’ rejection of offshore windmills. Money talks, and really big money talks really loud. From Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy to GOP supporter William Koch, the wealthy have said, “Not in my backyard.” Thus, the green tech Cape Wind project and similar projects have undergone years of environmental reviews and untold pages of reports. The Koch family suggests that since they would be able to see the windmills from their estate, that the field of turbines constitutes “visual pollution.” Uppity, right?


Whereas the less economically secure bear the burden of power plants both green and dirty, the rich enjoy the power because of their power. They support green energy—as long as…Well, out of sight, out of mind.


In the meantime, Democrats, at least the anti-cheap-energy Democrats, proclaim a bright new future of endless power from wind, hydro, wave, tidal bore (Rance River, eg.), and in some instances, nuclear generators. That promise of endless green power like so many other promises of a utopian world will probably never materialize as planned. We have history to prove that. We have current events as well.


Green Energy Is Great for the Few, Not so Great for the Many


Short of a bottleneck event like the eruption of Toba 74,000 years ago or the Black Death of the 14th century, Earth’s population will continue either in current numbers or in larger numbers. There’s little chance of turning back to, say, a world population of half a billion people when the two King Henrys fought the Welsh near Bishton; there’s not even a chance getting back to 1950 numbers of 2.5 billion. The current eight billion people consume more energy in amounts that exceed mere necessity. Right now, you are probably running some entertainment system on standby, not realizing that it is consuming energy. Right now, you probably have an unnecessary light on, a second alarm clock in a guest room, or a computer you never turn off.


In Our Nature


It’s in our nature to overuse in times of abundance like bears preparing for hibernation. It’s in our nature to say “not in my backyard” when we can control the backyard. And it’s in our nature to impose on others that which we would not impose on ourselves, like power stations of any kind. It’s also in our nature to make promises we can never keep, promises that run into the distant future and its unpredictable circumstances of war, disease, political folly, economic depressions, and a distant asteroid like Apophis that might hit Earth in 2036, well short of 40 years hence, or in 2068, just about the same time that those solar panels at Bishton will cease to function.


*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12661331/Fury-plans-Welsh-beauty-spot-UK-solar-farms-fears-kill-ecosystem.html

Person of the Year


In 2006 Time Magazine chose me as Person of the Year. “No joke,” as Joe Biden, another person of the year says. Okay, Time didn’t name me specifically. Instead, they called me “You.” Hmmnnn. I guess that includes you if you ever contributed to a website, maybe just a little comment in some chatroom. All right, so Time chose a bunch of us as person of the year. I hope the fame and adulation that accompanies the designation hasn’t interrupted your life, hasn’t sent you into disguise just to avoid the rabid paparazzi. So far, I’ve been able to go to the grocery store and on vacation without being recognized for my prestigious Time award, although, occasionally, someone out of the 18,000 college students I lectured over four decades comes up to me and says, “Hey, I think you taught me in college in the late sixties” or, “Professor Conte, I was a student of yours.” Fame: Once you have it, it’s like skunk spray.


Back in 2011 Time’s person of the year was “The Protestor.” And then in 2019, it chose a specific protestor.


The 2019 Award


In 2019 Time magazine’s editors chose a 16-year-old climate activist as its Person of the Year. It was, as all previous choices were, a move to increase circulation and a means to announce that Time was still relevant, still up to the times, so to speak. The selection of Greta Thunberg enhanced her fame and increased the adulation heaped on her. Unlike me—and maybe you—Greta is recognized almost everywhere she goes.


Among those editors in 2019, was Edward Felsenthal, Time’s Editor-in-Chief, the man who penned the logic behind the choice. Greta, he wrote, had been a galvanizing force, a child who inspired millions across the planet, a little girl many world leaders, like the UN Secretary General and the Pope, met in a photo op in sympathy for her cause. She was a worldwide “influencer.” Here’s a sentence from Felsenthal’s justification:


    “Meaningful change rarely happens without the galvanizing force of influential individuals, and in 2019, the earth’s existential crisis found one in Greta Thunberg."


Remind you of any other young girls who amassed an ardent set of followers? (Please don’t say Brittany Spears, Taylor Swift, or Beyonce) I’m thinking Joan of Arc.


The Claim and the Girl


That Edward Felsenthal included the phrase “existential crisis” is an indication that he lay in the camp of Greta, Earth’s champion. The phrase implies acceptance of the premise that global warming will do us all in, and not just us, but all species as Admiral Kirby recently said in an interview as he also voiced the phrase and echoed POTUS.


For the moment, consider Felsenthal’s “the earth’s existential crisis.” Obviously, the editors of Time took hook, line, and sinker the mantra of the climate change activists. They accepted, as evidenced by his using the phrase, the “unquestioned”—unquestionable?—assessment of the mythical “97% of scientists” that derived initially from an article by Naomi Oreskes (2004) and another survey that Al Gore turned into the consensus on anthropogenic warming. The sequence of all the above led to the claim that we were in the midst of or on the cusp of a self-imposed “existential crisis.” * This was—and still is, apparently--the paradigm under which Greta Thunberg lived her childhood, teen years, and current young adulthood; it is the paradigm under which Time’s editors selected her.


97%?


In the year that “The Protestor” was person of the year, Peter T. Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman ** published the results of their survey of 10,257 “earth scientists” on the subject of global warming. Some 3,146 of them responded to the two-item survey. The researchers asked:
        
     1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
    
     2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?   


First, I’ll do some math for you: 3,146 does not—I repeat, class, NOT—equal 10,257, even under the New Math. So, the percentages derived from the respondents aren’t percentages of all recipients of the survey.


Second, I’ll note that the word significant was undefined.


Third, I’ll direct your attention: There was NO mention of carbon dioxide.


Fourth: I want you to realize that of those respondents, 79 said they were experts or specialists in climate change, with 76 of them saying that temperature had risen since the end of the Little Ice Age and 75 saying “yes” to the second question. With regard to the second question, of the 103 economic geologists (mining, I suppose), 48 of 103 said “yes,” and 23 of 36 meteorologists said “yes.”


Fifth: The questions were simple: Did warming occur since the eighteenth century? Were humans involved? Who knows what lay in the minds of those respondents when they answered. Could they have been thinking of denuding the land, farming, impounding water, or urbanization—especially urbanization and its accompanying heat islands? Were they thinking carbon dioxide? Methane? Solar activity? Volcanism beneath the ocean surface and the ice sheets of Antarctica?


Thus, the “existential threat” mantra is not—NOT—97% of scientists. And even if it were, the question remains about the term “scientists,” since some such surveys have included social scientists. Note also, that climate, as I have recently pointed out, has its vicissitudes, is variable over the planet, and falls under different classification schemes that include information on evapotranspiration, precipitation, temperature, vegetation, and season. It matters, for example, when a “rainy” season occurs—especially for those who plan a vacation. It matters whether or not a region has a cool summer and cold winter, a warm summer and a cool winter, or a year round even temperature. It matters whether or not a region lies in the influence of prevailing wind systems, large cyclonic pressure systems, or coastal regions with offshore cold or warm currents.


And Greta. Well, she’s twenty right now, so she was a baby when Oreskes released her survey and a five-year-old when Al Gore received his Nobel. She grew up in a world inundated by climate change talk. She grew up under the aegis of the 97% myth and the existential threat mantra. And since her mid teens, she has been the center of adulation. “The kid who saved the world,” the modern Joan of Arc.


Why have I said the above? Am I some guy intent on bullying a young woman? Am I envious of her fame? Or am I about to compare Greta’s selection as person of the year to Time’s selection of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Ruhollah Khomeini, and Yassar Arafat?


Remember that Time’s selection centers on “newsmakers,” not necessarily on any judgment about the news they make. Stalin was a newsmaker because he defeated the Germans at Stalingrad. That he sacrificed Russian soldiers in head-on onslaughts seemed not to matter. Russia won the battle while suffering 1,129,619 total casualties, some 478,741 of them killed or missing and 650,878 wounded. And Stalin was a WWII ally of America where an America-centric Time was published. Hitler received the designation Man of the Year in 1938, just before he began his invasions and his death camps. Under Khomeini, Iran held American hostages. And Arafat? One could say that he was not shy about sacrificing Palestinians as human bombs. Just keep in mind that “person of the year” means “newsmaker.”


Greta Now, Felsenthal, Just Four Years Later


No. I have no intention of bullying St. Greta. I mention all the above persons of the year as one context for the 2019 Time acknowledgement of Greta as Person of the Year, a newsmaker for her galvanizing the planet in the name of “science” and for the sake of saving the planet from the “existential threat.”


But with time Time’s persons can change; or information about them once unknown becomes known; hidden character, policy, belief, or shortcomings will out themselves because persons of the year are like all of us, somewhat flawed. The world sparing judgment at the time of the selection will not spare it with new revelations. Keep in mind, also, that YOU were once person of the year, sharing that designation with me.


I wouldn’t have access to ask him, but I’m wondering whether or not Edward Felsenthal has seen Greta’s antisemitic photo. I wonder whether it bothers him that she has posted an image that will galvanize the world against Israel, Jews, and possibly his family. Felsenthal is Jewish. Will the editors of Time select her as a two-time Person of the Year, the Heisman of Social Influence, the newsmaker of 2023? Isn’t she more influential today than she was in 2019? Hasn’t her renown spread to every nook and cranny with the intrusiveness of WD-40 lubricant? Think of all the children and young adults she now influences, maybe numbering in the tens of millions, maybe in the hundreds of millions, certainly more than she influenced before her selection. And many of those followers have seen her posing with a symbol of antisemitism.


Unintentional or Not, All Our Actions Carry a Message and Reveal Character


So, Greta took down the photo with the antisemitic symbol and posted a new one with a similar message about freeing the Palestinians with the implication that Israelis had imprisoned them. Apparently, her world of followers saw the original. Her world of followers who saw the original probably did not see the second photo. Retractions rarely receive the attention the original gets, front page vs. page 16 bottom right corner. Plus, Greta seems to have made no effort to correct the image until after the storm of criticism hit social media.


As a young adult coming out of her whirlwind teenage years during which she met with world leaders, including the UN Secretary General and the Pope, flew across and sailed across the Atlantic, traveled to numerous countries, and led protests against fossil fuels, Greta is giving me, if not her followers, pause about her erudition. If she didn’t realize she was posting an antisemitic image that might result—if it hasn’t already done so—in injury and death among the world’s Jewish population or at least exacerbated tensions, then what else was missing in that committed brain of hers? What else hasn’t she realized?


Did a panic-stricken little teen get the Person of the Year designation because of her adult-imposed anxiety about “the existential threat”? Did the child who probably did no scientific research or read no scientific journals with an analytical eye on their import and relevance, did that child become a worldwide influencer while living in a state of relative ignorance about the “science” she proclaimed?


If I Could Administer a Climate Test


I would like to see Greta take college-level tests in atmospheric physics and chemistry. I would like to see her explain what climate is, how it became a classification scheme, how sundry interconnected Earth phenomena produce Earth’s climates, and how various climatologists have argued for or against the different classification schemes. I want to see what she knows about those classification schemes, also. Does she, for example, understand that a tropical rainforest climate differs from a tropical monsoonal climate and a tropical savanna? Can she explain how a “Mediterranean climate” prevails in places other than the Mediterranean? Does she see that some climate designations vary by emphasis on descriptive phenomena like vegetation, rainfall, and season of precipitation? “Tropical rainforest” and “tropical savanna” place the emphasis on vegetation in their name, whereas “tropical monsoonal” places emphasis on a rainy or stormy period. See, even the climatologists—the ones who made the classification schemes—aren’t completely consistent. Should we look at precipitation and temperature, both plus vegetation, or evapotranspiration potential? Some other parameter?


If I Could Administer a History Test


I would like to see Greta explain how the Palestinians and Israelis became “enemies.” Does she know, for example, that the two groups are genetically related—closely related? That’s the claim by James Watson in his book published on the 50th anniversary of his and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double helix.*** Does she know of the many attempts Israelis have made to appease their “brothers and sisters” in the Middle East? Does she know the various wars fought in the region? The history of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights? Is she aware of the genocide that is the only goal toward which Hamas strives? Does she know that to achieve that goal, Hamas butchers were high on amphetamines as Hitler’s blitzkrieg soldiers were in 1939? Did she ever go to a WWII concentration camp? Has she any sense of the difference between the democracy of Israel and the tyranny of terror in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and southern Lebanon? Did she ever see an Israeli soldier use the innocent as shields as Hamas does? Has she ever walked among the corpses of those her age slaughtered by Hamas?


Time’s Policy; Felsenthal’s Consequence


I suppose Time’s selection of a notable newsmaker has no promise for mankind (peoplekind? personkind?). So-n-So makes news. Time reports news. End of story.


But all that we do breeds consequences of some kind, as Chaos Theory suggests. Elevating any one of us eight billion flawed humans to a state of prominence because we somehow garnered attention by acts good, evil, and neutral, can have unintended consequences. Greta has followers because Time elevated her. Maybe all of her followers are simply obsessed with the “existential threat” mantra. But some might have evil in them. Some might just need a little assurance that some famous person believes as they believe, hates as they hate, seeks control as they seek control.


In 2019 Felsenthal could not have foreseen Greta’s recent antisemitic post. But he could have seen that the young newsmaker had little knowledge other than what she had been told. In his justification of her selection, he might have noted that St. Greta, the climate warriors’ modern Joan of Arc, had no scientific training, little knowledge of earth history, and only a dubious mantra of existential threat behind her burgeoning fame.


We Make Our Idols by Reductionist Thinking
​
Let’s not blame St. Greta for her following. This is what many people do: Follow. And it’s on the shoulders of those who follow that the idol rides. We make our idols; we hold them high, sometimes even when we know their shortcomings and faults, sometimes even when we know their inner evil because it manifests itself in something like the Holocaust. Seeing German Jews swept off the streets, did the German people rise up against Hitler or gather in throngs to sing him praise?


I remember my mother’s making a comment on some Hollywood personality years ago. I responded, “Who cares? Aren’t people just people?” I meant no disrespect to my mother an intelligent, but self-educated woman who had dropped out of school to help her parents raise a large family during the Depression, but I couldn’t see a reason for heightened fame and interest in a personal life just because someone I never met and would never meet acted in a movie. Why, I might add in this 2023 NFL season, does anyone outside the Kelce and Swift families care about who’s dating whom? Do I have favorite actors and actresses? Sure. Do I idolize them? No. I can watch a good actor act without associating the real with the fiction. I can watch with admiration the performance of someone whose political or ethical views differ from my own. If I borrow from T. S. Eliot’s words, I exhibit a type of dissociation of sensibility. I don’t care that Actor So-n-So lives in a mansion or supports a socialist; I watch ars gratis artis. Am I motivated by simple envy that I am not specifically named a person of the year instead of being lumped together with you and everyone else who ever made an online comment as we both were in 2006? No. I just prefer my humans to be human, not idols.


Choosing a person of the year involves mixing a little of the fiction with the real. Since we humans respond to first impressions more than we do to retractions of those impressions, the elevated become enmeshed in the common psyche of those willing to idolize. Hyperbole surfaces and accrues a meaning that substitutes for reality. A child becomes a leader of adults. St. Greta influences from her lofty perch. Little kids are led on a thirteenth-century-like crusade without realizing they’ll be victims of their enthusiastic idolatry when as adults their electric bills come due, their electric grid can’t supply them with power, and their internal combustion and electric vehicles lie rusting for want of gasoline and electricity. And in the meantime and on the social scene, antisemitism will continue both consciously and unconsciously, terrorists will be rewarded and praised, and the innocent on all sides of issues will be victimized.


When you see Time’s next person of the year, remember the justification for the selection isn’t predicated on anything more than newsworthiness.   


*Forget the eruption of Toba, the plagues, the endless wars, and the threat of nuclear annihilation; in the minds of climate activists, all of them pale by comparison to the rise of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius—but, as usual, I digress.


**Doran and Zimmerman. 3 Jun 2011. Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. EOS. https://doi.org/10.1029/2009EO030002 Accessed October 21, 2023. The two-page article (22,23) is online at https://docs.house.gov/meetings/II/II13/20190522/109519/HHRG-116-II13-20190522-SD004.PDF


***I apologize for not giving you the page reference. I lost or lent my copy of the book DNA: The Secret of Life by James D. Watson and Andrew Berry. It’s an interesting tale in which Watson notes the genetic similarity of Palestinians and Jews and the great genetic diversity in Queens, New York City. Definitely, it’s worth a read though it doesn’t give Rosalind Franklin the credit I believe she deserves for her role in the discovery of DNA’s double helix structure.

According to a report in the New York Post, Citi just fired a young employee because she posted a comment sympathetic to the actions of the Nazis during WWII and Hamas during the October massacres. As most humans with both common and moral sense might say, “Finally, a company that has the guts to weed the garden.”


Before her termination, twenty-five year old Nozima Husainova made $75,000 annually as a “personal banker” at Citi, supposedly to “foster relations with customers.” Imagine being a Jewish customer with an account or business under her care. Imagine seeing her instagram post that read “No wonder why Hitler wanted to get rid of all of them.” Citi probably acted out of two motivations: 1) She certainly can’t foster relations with some of our customers, and 2) She is blatantly antisemitic, racist, and morally corrupt if she condones a massacre and a genocide.


How would an ordinary day at the office go had she not posted her remark? Well, maybe in the  break room she might express her antisemitism and desire for genocide, but out among the offices and desks, the attractive young woman would have a pleasant, even jovial relationship. Maybe out among the others in the office, she would seem to be intelligent and ethical. She obviously pleased management enough to get the job two years ago.


Social Media Is a Priest Revealing the Confession


After Husainova made her comment, the world knew her psychological makeup, knew her dark interior, her murderous desires, and her lack of empathy for victims of an atrocity. The beast inside the beauty revealed itself.


And in her self-revelation, Husainova showed us another value of the First Amendment. Because people can freely “speak their minds,” we all have another mechanism to know who they are, really are. Instagram is not a private conversation whispered in the break room of Citi; it’s a megaphone in a mob, a pundit with widespread reach. And it’s as permanent as a gravestone carved from granodiorite. Social media is the priest emerging from the confessional and telling everyone in earshot, “Hey, you’ll never believe what So-n-So just told me.”


And Citi and the rest of us would never have known Husainova’s antisemitism and genocidal desires if America didn’t have the First Amendment. She knew her speech was protected speech. We learned about her because she had the right to spew her thoughts.


The First Amendment Protects Us in More Ways than One


Because we Americans have the right to free speech, we also have the opportunity to hear what others think and pass judgment on the nature of their character.


And yes, this is both good and bad. It’s the latter for those who reveal their dark interior only to find they must suffer the consequences of what they say. It’s the former because it’s a clarion that warns us about a potential and otherwise hidden danger. is Nozima Husainova a sleeper-cell terrorist? We don't know; probably she's not. But if I were Jewish or a supporter of Israel, I would not stand next to the subway tracks if I knew she stood behind me. 


Let them speak their minds. It’s how we know them.


Thaler, Shannon. 19 Oct 2023. Citi fires banker over ‘revolting’ Israel remark: ‘No wonder why Hitler wanted to get rid of all of them’ New York Post. Online at https://nypost.com/2023/10/19/citi-fires-staffer-over-revolting-hitler-remark-on-israel/. Accessed October 20, 2023.

In its satirical book Gender, the Babylon Bee offers “The Comprehensive Handbook to Men, Women, and Millions of New Genders We Just made Up!” The book is dedicated to “The Babylon Bee’s ‘Man of the Year’: Rachel Levine,” HHS’s Admiral. No doubt Rachel is used to such derision, but shim seems capable of weathering such a verbal storm. Shim is a real doctor, and shim has made a personal choice with which no non-transgender person can argue on the grounds of perspective. If shim is happy, that’s all that counts as long as shim does shim’s job.


At Levine’s confirmation hearing, Senator Dr. Rand Paul questioned shim about allowing trans surgeries on children. Shim’s answer was that it was a conversation shim was willing to have with the senator, but my guess is that the two never held that talk. Shim was confirmed, and now shim’s department seems to have issued the mandates on pronouns and restroom facilities. I say “seems” because this is an age of misinformation, an age of AI under the control of anyone with the wherewithal to manipulate computers, and an age of a Press too afraid to question any policy of a Democrat Administration.


The policy includes the use of restrooms by preference. Think you’re male? Use the door marked “Men.” Think you’re female? use the door marked “Women.” Think you prefer one or the other on any given day? Use whatever facility you want. Nothing like shoes pointing in opposite directions in adjacent stalls!


A Living Language Changes


In a living language, words, spelling, grammar, and syntax change through conscious and unconscious selection, much like artificial hybridization of animals and plants imposed on natural random genetic variations. In its evolution, English pronouns have undergone change, and there’s no reason to believe they won’t undergo further change.

“Traditionalists” and current users balk at adopting new forms in any human endeavor simply because habit is a strong motivator. Some 1.5 billion English speakers, both first-language and second-language communicators, are used to the pronouns they learned when they began to speak and write the language. For them, which means for all but the smallest percentage of English speakers, he is a masculine pronoun that refers to a biological male; she, a feminine pronoun.


With the exception of hermaphroditic humans, most people are born either male or female. Combos occur only slightly more frequently than filet mignon on a MacDonald’s menu. Few humans have encountered true hermaphroditic people, so the common mindset is that humans come in two versions with complementary organs that facilitate reproduction. This physical fact underlies centuries of language development during which the majority determines acceptable language. If nearly all the 1.5 billion English speakers, following on the heels of previous English speakers who taught them, accept the words, spellings, syntax, and grammar they learned, then those speakers determine the language—of the present, which is the language of the immediate and ancient past. To its Indo-European origins, English has added medieval Anglo-Saxon and Frisian, the Middle English of Chaucer’s time, Shakespeare’s Renaissance English, and current Modern English with its plethora of Industrial and Technological Age neologisms all linking as the context for usage in the twenty-first century.


It’s in this historical context that the HHS emailed mandates in an attempt to impose a “new English.” And history shows that conscious selection can change language as banned words indicate. Such deliberate word changes accompany unconscious adoption of words like normalcy for the pre-Teddy Roosevelt normality and athleticism for various terms for prowess on the fields of play, such as agility, strength, and quickness.


The History of English Pronouns


English has different kinds of pronouns. They evolved from a language that originally identified words as “masculine” or “feminine” the way Latin did and its offspring romance languages now do. Thus, English has “personal pronouns” that are clearly one or the other: Masculine he (nominative or subject case), his (possessive or genitive case), him (objective, indirect objective, accusative or dative case), and feminine personal pronoun corollaries, she, her, hers, and her, the last one serving as an “objective case” pronoun. These “singular number” pronouns have common plurals: They, their, theirs, and them, all “third person” pronouns.


English lost the dative, indirect object, case during its transition from an inflected language to a largely un-inflected language. Those who learned Latin, for example, had to memorize nominative, possessive, objective, dative, and ablative forms of words in declensions. No doubt even among Romans, there were those who failed to use those forms in the traditional and formal manners. A modern equivalent of misuse of pronoun and verb number agreement lies in the oft-heard “it don’t,” “he don’t,” and “she don’t,” or in the UK, “he were” (which is acceptable in a subjunctive mood “if he were” as a statement of an unreal condition, such as “If I were you…”). Most "educated people" recognize that faulty number agreement (between pronoun and antecedent) is substandard English, but now HHS will force all to accept the fault as normal in "they doesn't" (for a person whose pronoun of choice is "they"). 


Probably the most commonly known pronoun change can be seen in the second person personal pronoun that the King James Version and some of its followers use: We can associate the Amish use of ye, thy, and thine with Old and Middle English. The use of ye for you represents an earlier form of the second person personal pronoun. And spelling has similarly changed in recognizable ways: hem becoming him, hir becoming her. And even the letters themselves have undergone change, as the Old English thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) became the th in them. Those forms of our Late Modern English for the third person plural personal pronouns were ðe, ðem, ðer, and ðerz, with ð representing the digraph th.


So, yes, pronouns have changed over the centuries since the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians peopled western Europe and the British Isles. And there were many influences on this Germanic language, from Scandinavian to Romance languages. Will we now see a new major influence in the form of a US government official language? In an HHS-mandated language? And how severe will the punishments be for a slip of the tongue based on tradition, habit, and common sense? If the judge is Rachel Levine, could a conscientious objector get a fair deal?


Where Are We Headed?


Will HHS also mandate changes in the other kinds of pronouns in addition to personal pronouns? What will it decree or ban among relative (who, etc.), reflexive (himself, etc.), or reciprocal (each other, etc.), demonstrative (this, etc.), interrogative (what? etc.), intensive (again, himself, etc), and indefinite (some, any, etc.) pronouns? Will HHS become a school unto itself and we the pupils? Will it add to the mandates like wearing not one, not two, but three masks while infusions of vaccines course through our veins?


As in the Past


As it has over the past 15 centuries, English will change over the next 15 centuries. Some of those changes will occur over decades or centuries; some will occur after a single decree by the prevailing political class. But in their attempt to accommodate everyone, they will eventually erase the connection between words and realities. They will appease a few by quashing the rest. Their intentions will be noble, but their results will be a stilted language and a suppressed people.

Yup, there it went, that childhood we stole from Greta. Seems we evil fossil-fuel consumers let her slip without joy into young adulthood. We denied her playing by using coal, oil, and natural gas. Her parents and relatives never bought her a toy made from the byproducts of fossil fuels, ethylene and propylene. Were they real-life models of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi? “No toys for you.” Aren’t most toys made from plastic?


Every Barbie Doll, every Ken, every Barbie car or house, is like the proverbial butterfly in chaos theory. The insect flaps its wings in the Amazon, setting in motion events that lead to a hurricane or a tornado outbreak. Had Greta played with toys, well, who knows what dire weather events we might have faced? Toys produce storms, or droughts, or nice weather, or hot days, or cold ones, or the weather inside malls. Plastics robbed childhood from Greta. Blame Disney, Mattel, Fisher-Price…


Robbed of her childhood—her words, not mine—Greta is now a young adult, and someone is robbing her of her young adulthood, maybe older adults, the ones addicted to fossil fuels. She might have failed to save her childhood, but she’s determined not to fail in saving her young adulthood.


But she will fail because it’s Greta doing the robbing, and she’s robbing you as much as she’s robbing herself.


Stolen Childhood


In reality, she was the thief, not the rest of us. She’s the one hopscotching around the planet attending protests against the use of fossil fuels and not playing with Barbies. She’s the one claiming suffering directly results from climate change, enveloping Earth in hot summers, cold winters, and in-between springs and falls. And the hurricanes. Poor Sweden, her native land, now beset by weather extremes never before seen on the planet—according to her and her ilk. And the deaths in Sweden, now mounting it seems…Shoot! They’re not climate related. They’re gang related. There are bombings and shootings in Sweden akin to those in Mexico. Children murdered in stray gunfire…Was it the butterfly climate change that moved the migrant criminals into Sweden? Probably. What other cause is there but climate change?


Sorry, I got off topic. Greta was recently arrested during a protest in London. * Hauled off by police, she smirked. She’s worked her stolen childhood into international fame. She’s become an icon, a savior bent on sacrificing herself for the planet. It’s willful, too. No one is pushing her into her climate activism. She’s decided on a cause. And in fifty years, when she’s seventy and living comfortably in a green energy chalet, she will look back to congratulate herself on her accomplishments, such as costing millions of people billions if not trillions of dollars in extra energy costs without achieving energy abundance and independence.


And while she grows old under whatever climate conditions she chooses—tropical rainforest, tropical savanna, tropical monsoon, temperate warm summer and cool winter, temperate cool summer and cold winter, boreal, Arctic, arid cold or hot, semiarid cold or hot, Mediterranean,  or high altitude—she has already outlived those children whose childhood has literally been robbed in their violent deaths, or cancer, or genetic flaws. Greta will find in looking back that in her efforts to convince the world to stop using fossil fuels, she possibly hastened the return of a colder world, a real climate change. She’ll never, of course, live long enough to see whether or not the current interglacial period returns to a frozen Northern Hemisphere nor live long enough to recognize that the use of fossil fuels might just have staved off a return to cold. She won’t live long enough to know whether or not the measures we now take will enhance a different kind of climate change from the one she believes is inevitable.


She’ll only live long enough to look back at her lost childhood, lost young adulthood, and lost middle age. She look back at her fame and consider that she was a major force in convincing adults to give up cheap energy and plastics, in effect, robbing them of the very instruments of turning the pre-Industrial Age into the advanced technological age in which we now live.


If You Had Your Druthers…


Do you prefer the climate in which you live to another climate? Do you realize—Greta doesn’t—that you can willfully change climate just by moving. I’ve listed above a number of climate regimes. Pick one; pick several. Stay or move. But if you intend to move, do it before there’s no energy system available for transportation. Otherwise, like an old Greta Thunberg, you might be relegated to a life in a chalet hoping in a land of the Midnight Sun that there will be enough solar energy to power you through winters—there won’t be—enough wind to turn the windmills, or enough hydroelectic power to run your lights. You'll be tempted, as she will be, to throw some carbon in the fireplace. 


*https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12639153/Greta-Thunberg-joins-hundreds-eco-warriors-central-London-protest-activists-bang-drums-chant-oily-oily-money-out.html

One of the struggles many people have lies in how they deal with a grievous wrong, such as the murder of a child. Sure, they know what the usual ethic promotes: Forgive those who have done wrong. For Christians, Christ on the Cross asking for forgiveness for his persecutors is the model. That dictum, embedded in The Lord’s Prayer in various versions (trespasser, trespasses, debtors, debt), is expressed in several other religions, Janism, for example (“I grant forgiveness to all living beings. May all living beings grant me forgiveness. My friendship is with all living beings. My enmity is totally nonexistent”) and Hinduism (“Forgiveness subdues (all) in this world; what is there that forgiveness cannot achieve? What can a wicked person do unto him who carries the sabre of forgiveness in his hand? Righteousness is the one highest good; and forgiveness is the one supreme peace …”).


But forgiving is difficult after a tragic loss. In the context of moral systems and their followers’ compliance, “fore-giving” is easy to do in thoughts, words, or actions prior to an offense. But once an offense occurs, particularly an egregious offense, then only a few seem to follow the dictum; only a special few can forgive the offender.


Take the tragedy of a Chicago policewoman killed in a senseless gun battle. Here’s the headline from the Chicago Sun Times after the trial during which the perpetrator Eric Morgan pleaded guilty and received a seven-year sentence:


“Mom of slain Chicago police Officer Ella French faces man charged in fatal shooting: ‘My faith tells me to forgive, I’m not ready for that.’”— Elizabeth French, Officer Ella’s mother. *


The unnecessary death of a child is probably the most difficult human tragedy to endure. Love and hope disappear in an instant, a vacuum forms, and for what, for the impulse of a man without compunction? For unbridled hate? For trinkets in a jewelry store, a shiny car, cash, drugs, or evil impulse?


It’s easy to “fore-give” as moral systems advise; it’s very hard to forgive. Keep that in mind during the current war with Hamas, a war that Hamas started and perpetrated with utter savagery.


The Juxtaposition Is the Dilemma


Surely, I subscribe to “forgive your enemy” ethics; and just as surely, I would echo Elizabeth French’s words, “I’m not ready for that” if I lived in any part of the world under attack by terrorists. All loss and grief endure. Forgiveness takes time because feeling the needless loss of life persists in those who remain. We’ve all heard words like those of Pope John Paul II: “Forgiveness is above all a personal choice, a decision of the heart to go against natural instinct to pay back evil with evil.” And just as surely, we’ve heard that it’s character weakness to carry a grudge or seek revenge. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”


But strong for what? Theory or practice? Dictum or act? Principle or emotion? To go against the natural instinct to pay back evil with evil? Is the lack of forgiveness a moral weakness? Is payback not a form of justice, deserved justice? Deserved retribution in the context of a life-shattering loss?


Thoughts of revenge and not forgiveness prevail as the “moral reality” after an act of barbarism. “Fore-giveness” collapses into a black hole of despair in the wake of savagery. Think of the people brutalized and killed by Hamas militants this October, 2023, and ask yourself how an entire nation might not think, “We need to forgive.” How does one put into practice a religious principle that is meaningful until it isn’t? And in the circumstance of terrorism and killing for killing’s sake, “fore-giveness” seems to have very little practical effect when no matter how forgiving one is after an atrocity, the perpetrators show no remorse and rejoice in their barbarism. Is it understandable under such circumstances that “fore-giving” does not morph into forgiving?


Righteousness in a Vacuum


In an October worldwide protest over Israel’s response to the attack that killed more than a thousand of its citizens, many praised Hamas for the atrocities and justified them on the basis of equivocation: Israel in their minds has practiced the very behavior that Hamas openly admits to employing, an attempt at genocide. It’s a classic case of projection. Ascribe to someone or some group the behavior of the perpetrator. Those self-righteous people who praise the indiscriminate rocket attacks by a terrorist group that has done nothing positive for the Palestinians, but has, rather, kept them in poverty and hopelessness, would probably never wish to live in Gaza under Hamas rule. From afar they equivocate a retaliation with an attack.


You might wonder as I do, how such equivocation arises save for decades, if not three millennia, of the heritage of hate and bias. Personally, I cannot take the condemnation of the 31 Harvard groups that faulted Israel for the attack by Hamas as anything other than both a reductio ad absurdum and a gross non sequitur that I have seen so often in supposed intellectuals living outside the sphere of danger and loss. Their moral equivocation of retaliation and attack and their certainty while rejecting proof of the atrocities of Hamas make their protests against Israel hollow.


Fore-giveness Is Easy; Forgiveness Is Not Just Hard, It Is Almost Impossible in Terrorism


Those who pass judgment on Israelis live lives of moral equivalence and convenience. Given the horrors of the massacres, they find fault in the victims and discount that such murders even happened. They do so, however, in the absence of actual experience, of seeing up close and in person the bodies of the tortured and slain. They do so in a vacuum that no rockets penetrate, no terrorists overrun as they shoot young people who are enjoying a music festival.


They live in a moral vacuum from which they proclaim an unreality that has little connection to the reality on the ground. They pass judgment on Israelis who find forgiving difficult, especially in the midst of ongoing atrocities. And they accuse Israelis of genocide when Hamas has proclaimed its genocidal goal.


Free from any threat to their lives, the supporters of Hamas in places like Harvard would no doubt protest life under the organization’s rule. In the absence of personal loss, they blame the victim and see a black-and-white world in which a country that has existed under almost constant attack and that lies in the midst of hundreds of millions of Muslims bent on its destruction as the guilty party not worthy of forgiveness.


And now that Israel as of this writing is destroying infrastructure after the October attack, the protestors fault it as a genocidal country without realizing that, for example, sewer pipes funded by organizations around the world have been used not for sewerage and urbanization in Gaza, to for upgrading and gentrifying Palestinian life, but for making rockets. Far removed from the impoverishment imposed on Palestinians by Hamas, the protestors have no room in their hearts to forgive long-suffering Israel for the plight of the Palestinians, even though the very strip of land known as Gaza was given to those Palestinians by the Israelis.


There’s little forgiveness in the Middle East though every religion in the region incorporates it as a guiding principle. Years ago, I read a tongue-in-cheek article about college sidewalks that cross the quads and yards of campuses. Originally laid out in perpendicular arrangements, sidewalks become interspersed with diagonal paths that over time the universities pave, thinking that they have eliminated the path-making by accommodating the path-makers. But even the diagonal sidewalks acquire diagonal paths and so on. Students cut the corners even after the schools post “Keep off the Grass” signs. Like those signs and admonitions to practice a principle of walking on sidewalks, the principle of forgiving does not control the traffic of human emotions after an egregious offense.


“FORGIVENESS” could flash from a neon sign on every church, synagogue, temple, or shrine. It would be proclaimed before but not practiced after an egregious offense.




*ago.suntimes.com/crime/2023/10/12/23914343/ella-french-chicago-police-shooting-guilty-eric-morgan   and
https://news.yahoo.com/hope-come-learn-very-wrong-211900142.html