Representative Cori Bush (D-MO), speaking to George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s Good Morning America, defended her calls to defund the police by saying “we can’t get caught up in words.” In the seriocomic series The Orville, the main character Ed Mercer says, “Why do we have to have all these labels and things?…Why even call a box ‘a box’?”
Mercer’s friend Gordon responds with “Maybe it’s just easier to have words.”


I’ll admit: Going public with any statement today invites nitpicking, and not just ordinary nitpicking, but hounding, relentless nitpicking. But there’s some justification in our singling out a word or phrase made into a public icon. Unless we can flawlessly interpret gestures and expressions, we have to rely on language. It’s just easier to have words with clearly defined definitions.


Yet, therein lies another problem, the problem of definition. What does defund mean? If the key word that encapsulates a movement is variable or undefined, then it is meaningless. We need to “get caught up in words” because they are the avenue to understanding—even if that understanding is imperfect because of nuances. 


Language has long been a boon and a curse. Very often not precise enough to have the same meaning for two people or two groups, misinterpreted language has confounded relationships and even led to conflict as small as disagreements and as large as war. The “defund the police” movement, given no specific workable alternative for violent offenders, has resulted in depleted police forces and increased crime. Put into action on the simplest understanding of the term, the “defund the police” movement has led to destruction, injury, and death. Those consequences by themselves are good reason “to get caught up in words.”


“Choose your words wisely” is good advice because someone somewhere is going “to get caught up in words.”

We are boring because we can be interesting. But maybe we are just a little more boring than we are interesting. Interest peaks over a boring base state. Should I add that we are also stupid because we are wise?


Capable as we are of discovering  and achieving much, we often get stuck on old grudges, daily weather, and the topics and perspectives that sundry media repeatedly force on us: Fashion, gossip (about some celebrity or person we do not know and will never meet), climate, racism, gender, political extremes, government (overreach, waste, corruption), and abortion. Such topics are centers of discussions that we just can’t resolve in some gray compromise, mostly because we can’t complete or choose in our sloth not to complete complex arguments in a fast-paced world of TikTok and YouTube shorts and Twitter aphorisms. “Just give me the headlines.” So we harp. And harp. And harp, strumming the strings of just a few tunes repeatedly, simple tunes, really, nothing complex. The lyrics for the strummed notes are just about as predictable as the rising Sun. What, may I ask, have you heard recently that you might label “new” with regard to any of these topics? What primary or secondary research have you done to make your own perspective “interesting”?


“Whoa!” you say. “Maybe you find discussions of those topics boring, Donald, but I see them as crucial to a life well-lived in a complex society. By the way, those topics aren’t minor matters, my friend. They are the heart of today’s social interactions. They keep us engaged. You’re missing the reality that these topics do peak interest and make living in the twenty-first century interesting. Sure, we divide ourselves on our perspectives, but that’s a product of our wisdom and freedom to express. And you miss that each person finds identity by taking a stance on these matters. Remember the Delphic maxim? Knowing oneself is primary. Finding identity in these topics gives one identity.”


I wasn’t surprised to hear one of the ladies of The View and a CNN host link Hurricane Ian to climate change. Why wouldn’t they? Both are convinced that this topic, that is, the topic of climate change or global warming, is one of those few topics over which people—at least people in the news—obsess. And since the obsession to tie climate to politics is now endemic in the minds of billions, then neither I nor anyone else should be surprised by the supposed link the lady and the guy see between 2022’s Ian and global warming. And—b-o-r-i-n-g—every topic like climate change is today a political topic, so if one can link individual storms and climate, then one can easily see the difference between “right views” from “wrongheaded ones.” I suppose that one can also link climate change to morality because even the Pope has entered the climate debate.


As Ian formed and approached Florida, I noted to my spouse that the storm would be linked to climate in the mainstream media—and we all know which media that includes. Thus, the devastating storms of the Caribbean and Gulf, having raged over the land since there was a Caribbean and Gulf—go ask the Arawaks, the Maya, the Aztecs, the Seminoles, and the conquistadors—are now somehow manmade and not part of some cyclic natural phenomena. Shouldn’t we all wise up? Not to see popularized indisputable link and not to obsess over the storm’s assumed cause puts one in a minority labeled “deniers.” There’s a message in the storm, and only a foolish few—I suppose like me—are incapable of reading it. Boring.


“Get with the program. What’s wrong with you, Donald. Can’t you reason that very warm ocean water made the storm as powerful as it was, causing probably more damage than all but four previous hurricanes?”


No. Actually, I do know that the water was warm—as it usually is by the end of summer’s prolonged daylight—and I might even accept that the water was “warmer than usual” for Ian’s development. But usual is one of those catchall boring terms. How far back can we go to trace surface water temperatures? We have no temperature records of those temperatures when a hurricane following almost the same path as Ian sank the Nuestra Señora de Atocha and other Spanish galleons in 1622 near the Florida Keys. Anyway, do you think that 1622 storm caused as much devastation on the land as Ian caused?


“What?”


Yep. In our boring arrogance, we humans have decided that we can live anywhere—regardless of the physical phenomena of a place. Build on the San Andreas Fault? No problem. Build along a coast or on a low-lying island that will inevitably get hit by a hurricane or tsunami? No problem. Build in the shadow of an active volcano? No problem. What are the chances, right? And one might live a century on a fault or coast or low-lying island or at the foot of a volcano without a disaster. Then again… The 29,000 people who died in Saint-Pierre in 1902 when Mount Pelée erupted made their homes beneath a volcano that had erupted at least a couple of dozen times over the previous five millennia, and even after the 1902 eruption, some chose to re-inhabit Saint-Pierre. Are we really wise? Isn’t settling at the base of an active volcano a man-made disaster in the making? In fact, in 1929, residents of Saint-Pierre evacuated under the threat of a second twentieth-century eruption. Is it our arrogance or our stupidity that makes us live where Earth proves to be more dangerous? And is it our boring nature to ascribe an individual event to a disputable global trend?


In 1966, my spouse and I had reservations for a cottage on Sanibel Island, that same place where Hurricane Ian wreaked its havoc on September 29, 2022. Sparsely populated and underdeveloped at the time of our trip, Sanibel was an island wilderness known for its sea shells and not for expensive accommodations. Property was cheap. An acre went for about $2,500. In 2022, just before Ian hit, some half-acre and smaller lots were on the market for as much as $900,000, and condos and homes ranged from $300,000 to $4,000,000+. Pricey.


As we traveled toward Florida, we became aware of a June hurricane called Alma, the first June hurricane since 1951. (In fact, June hurricanes are so rare that no such storm had made landfall in the U.S. since 1825) Alma headed for Sanibel and eventually trekked a path almost identical to that of Ian, crossing into the Florida peninsula somewhat farther north, causing $10 million in damages overall in the state, drowning two, fostering heart attacks in another two, and with downed power lines, leading to the deaths of another two Floridians who were electrocuted. A ten-foot storm surge washed over New Port Richey. Was the ocean water “warmer” than usual that year? Was the 1966 storm the product of global warming? Was the storm that sank Nuestra Señora de Atocha the product of global warming in 1622?


Calling ahead to assess the conditions of the cottage, we were told by the owner “to give us a day or two for cleanup.” So, we postponed our arrival in an era before 24/7 news coverage and sophisticated modeling of storm tracks. I had to rely on my car’s AM radio and on newspapers to discover where I could shelter without encountering the storm. When we eventually drove over the now damaged causeway and onto the island, we saw no apparent destruction because Sanibel offered little to damage, even for a category 1 storm.


Not so with Ian. Granted, Ian was stronger than Alma, but Ian also had something—lots of things, really—to destroy. Sanibel and neighboring Captiva Island in 2022 were pre-Ian highly developed landscapes, not the largely wild islands of 1966 when Alma hit.


And that might be something the lady on The View and the guy at the CNN news desk might have taken into account instead of the boring and unprovable link between worldwide climate change and the intensity of a specific storm. No doubt the experienced Spanish sailors of the 16th and 17th centuries thought the hurricanes they encountered were extraordinarily strong storms to which their sunken treasure ships attest. And no doubt, since I brought up the subject of building over the San Andreas Fault, the damage of the next earthquake will generate a larger economic and human impact than the last major earthquake. (Also, the next large earthquake will probably generate speculation that its intensity is related to climate change in the minds of CNN reporters, just as the passing of an asteroid was linked by a CNN anchor to global warming during an interview with Bill Nye)


We are boring when we obsess over standardized ways of discussing any topic. “Just give me the short version” is an admission that our patience runs out when someone wants to pursue a topic through an elaborate argument. (And, of course, we are boring when we go into great detail with someone not willing to listen) It’s what I call the Algebra Teacher Principle. Algebra teachers want students to show all their work; their students want to take short cuts. The lady on The View and the anchor on CNN wanted the “short version” of Hurricane Ian, and that version involved standardized talking points, boring talking points that advance no new knowledge, but rely instead on popular assumptions.


Should I fault the TV personalities for being so predictable and boring? Probably not. True, they could delve into the actual complex science of climate, a subject that includes ocean currents, land-water distribution, latitudinal effects, orographic barriers, altitude, continentality, prevailing wind systems, evapotranspiration, Hadley Cells, Milankovich cycles, and other features, including soil development and processes like the molecular interactions among atmospheric components and the relationship between albedo, clouds, and the thickness of the troposphere. For the host or anchor of a TV show, it is just simpler to connect global warming and a specific storm, and it’s made especially truer for them because of the popularization of the idea of climate change serves a political agenda.


But it is all so boring. And it’s especially boring when talking points are all we hear. For a species that prides itself on wisdom, we seem to rely more on hearsay, innuendo, rumor, incomplete knowledge, presumptions, and foregone conclusions.


I think of the movie Amadeus and the entrance of Mozart while Sallieri plays a rather simple composition he wrote in honor of the young genius. Mozart, not one to follow etiquette and refrain from insult, sits and replays from memory what Sallieri wrote, but in doing so elaborates in the best tradition of ingenious improvisation. He makes the work interesting by adding details.


So, yes, I’m bored with the climate-change, global-warming talk and incessant connections that further an agenda without advancing knowledge. Individual storms have come and gone not only in Earth’s atmosphere, but in the atmospheres of all planets that have an envelope of gases. Maybe Jupiter’s Giant Red Spot, which is twice the size of Earth, is an exception to the ephemeral nature of storms, but it, too, seems to show signs of change.


All the boring talk would be simply boring if it was not dangerously boring. The prattling few with a microphone have ensured a conclusion in the political class that they must act drastically and alter a thriving economy with decrees that must be enacted overnight, such as California’s decision to “go electric” on a power grid that can’t handle the current draw. The prattling few will say, regardless of historical data to the contrary, that hurricanes are strengthening because the damage they cause is greater. They assume climate and not population distribution and construction in hurricane-prone areas is solely the cause of such destruction.


If you step in the path of a bullet, you are likely to be hit. The Gulf and Atlantic Coast communities survive only when the shooter has a poor aim. But the target is large and has been getting larger over the past four hundred years—and with regard to Sanibel Island and Fort Myers Beach, larger just over the past half century. Man-made disaster? Think building rather than climate. Electric cars in California—or elsewhere-won’t prevent the next disastrous hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, tornado, or volcanic eruption (or, CNN anchor, bolide impact).

You’ve seen or heard the saying, “The children are our future.” But are they?


I can’t remember where exactly, but it was a sign on some road, maybe one on a school marquis, and it read, “The children are our future.” Ordinarily, I would have passed the sign with a mental note that “Yes, they are, obviously.” But I had just seen a couple of on-the-street interviews on YouTube involving college-age students. Those interviews elicited in me a rejection of that old saying as an encapsulation of optimism. I’ve come to believe that the opposite is true.


The children are our past.


If optimistically we can say the children are the future—our future—why does every generation repeat the mistakes of its forebears? And not just the immediate forebears, the whole of humanity’s ancestors?


Anecdotes aren’t proof, but they can be indicators. In one YouTube interview I saw, a girl said she didn’t like Donald Trump because “he was a capitalist.” When the interviewer asked what she was, she replied, “I’m a communist.” In response to his next question about where communism “had worked” for the betterment of mankind, she said something like “Here, in the past.”


Everyone knows Santayana’s statement about repeating past mistakes, maybe even the girl in the interview—though I doubt it. But ignorance of the past is exactly why I cannot see children as our future. Oh! Sure, some will know that socialist and communist regimes have been responsible for more than 100 million deaths, maybe as many as 200 million murders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but those will be few in number and will not be "the future." No, the future belongs to the ignorant, to those who will repeat the mistakes of the past.


Take little Vlad, for example. Born into the Soviet Union, he has grown to become the head of that union’s heart, Mother Russia. Desirous of having things as they were during his formative years, Vlad has set about conquering, or should I say, reconquering Soviet lands and peoples. In the process he has started a war, and armed with nuclear weapons, this child-turned-adult has threatened to use them. So, here we go again, would-be conqueror after would-be conqueror, from ancient times to modern, the child takes the misery of the past into his generation’s present, that past becoming the future of a generation and eventually becoming the past to be ignored by a future generation—those children proclaimed to be “our future.”


Thus, the current generation of anarchists, not realizing the futile nature of their anarchy, destroy as their ideological forebears destroyed—with no workable system in mind other than destruction in the name of some ideal. Thus, the destruction in Seattle and Portland and in other cities over the past 120 years. And always with the same result, always with the recreated past as the product of the “children.” Thus, the current generation of gangs wreak havoc as their forebears did in almost every “civilized” country. Thus, the next generation of warlords cause the same kind of misery their forebears caused in attempts to control those in their sphere of influence or in attempts to expand their control. And thus, a nation built successfully on capitalism will succumb to today’s children as they turn the future into the past.


And, of course, we have only ourselves to blame. We—the people of any generation—never seem to get the message to the following generation. No one ever seems to have taught Vlad and his like, for example, that the destruction and death they cause will come to them in return, that conquerors and dictators are never really mourned though the officials they emplace or who take their places might erect monuments to them. No one ever seems to have told the current young that socialism and communism are repressive and that unless they are among the ruling elite—whose own success will succumb with their own demise or to the next generation’s greed—they will repeat the failures that run, among Americans, for example, from Brook Farm through Jonesville and Heaven’s Gate. No one seems to have explained that the aimless destruction of past anarchic movements is the future of current anarchists and that they will themselves succumb to unwanted anarchy: The so-called CHOP district, where crimes and even murder occurred is one telling example, and the Occupy Wall Street movement, also bedeviled by crimes, including rape and assault, is another example.


So, no, I don’t believe the children are our future. Well, maybe some are, but they will as we, have to contend with contemporaries who seek to relive the past because they are unaware of its nature. Thus, humanity today, repeating the mistakes made throughout all of human history from Cain to Vlad, will find its future firmly rooted in its past.


Time to take down that often repeated statement that claims optimistically “Children Are Our Future” and replace it with “Children Are Our Past.” 

Is there a way out of the seemingly endless cycle of violence and folly? Generation after generation has tried. Heck, one can go back to Psalm 95 in which the psalmist advises against hardening one's heart. We can as our ancestors have, plead with the next generation in paraphrase of that advice, "If today you hear our voice, harden not your heart." It hasn't worked before, but why not give it a try on the odd chance that it just might work this time? 

Two guys, say, Gerard and Frank, talk about the news.


Gerard: So, I hear that Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House and Vineyard Owner, says that the immigrants are needed "to pick our crops."


Frank: Yeah, that’s what she said. One wonders, however…


Gerard: Wonders what?


Frank: Well, I wonder about the grape equation.


Gerard: The what?


Frank: Grape…grape equation. You know, how many pickers one needs to pick grapes in a vineyard.


Gerard: We can figure that. I read online that a typical grape vine can produce 40 bunches of grapes, maybe with a 100 grapes each. So, that’s 4,000 grapes per vine.


Frank: Sounds approximately right. But it could be an overshoot. Maybe not quite that figure, but let’s go with it. Okay, so how many vines in a typical vineyard?


Gerard: About 1,000 vines per acre.


Frank: So, 4,000 grapes per vine times 1,000 vines would equal four million grapes. Yep. 


Gerard: And what’s the estimate on number of illegal immigrants encountered at the border in during the Biden presidency?


Frank: That’s a tough one because there are estimates for "getaways" and counts for those caught, but let’s run with four million. There are estimates that take the number to five million just since Biden took office.


Gerard: So, let’s settle on four million to make the math easy for that grape equation. If each illegal immigrant picked just one grape, then they could handle an acre of vineyard easily. But, of course, vineyards have more than one acre. Nancy Pelosi has 16.55 acres. So, 16.55 times four million grapes equals 66.2 million grapes. That means that each immigrant has to pick 16.55 grapes—which doesn’t sound like the most effective use of cheap labor. Of course, I'm joking. An immigrant can pick more than that in a day, and given months of harvest...heck, a single migrant could pick thousands, tens of thousands...especially since they grow in bunches. It's not like going out into the woods to pick wild blackberries one at a time. 


Frank: There are thousands of acres devoted to grape-growing in California. I don’t know how many, but there have to be thousands with a growing-and-harvest season that probably runs from May to January. i wonder how many acres...


Gerard: Why bother to guess. There’s an official report by the CDFA. It’s online. Wait. Hmmmmnnn…Here it is. California Grape Acreage Report, 2019 Summary. * Let’s see…



    "California’s 2019 grape acreage totaled 918,000 acres. Of the total grape acreage, 860,000 were bearing while 58,000 were non-bearing. The wine-type grape acreage is estimated at 635,000 acres. Of the total acres, 590,000 were bearing and 45,000 were non-bearing. Table-type grape acreage totaled 130,000 acres with 121,000 bearing and 9,000 non-bearing. Acreage of raisin-type grapes totaled 153,000 acres, of which 149,000 were bearing and 4,000 were non-bearing."

Frank: Shrivel me up and call me Raisin. That’s a lot of grapes.


Gerard: Funny you should say that. The report also categorizes the number of acres used for raisins, and it mentions…look here…1,2,3,4,5,6.7….Geez! It lists over fifty kinds of grapes, from Allison to Vintage Red, used for raisins, and…Let me see…1,2,3…over 30 types for white wines and about the same number for red wines. Hard to keep the immigr…er…number of grapes in mind, especially because the report also lists synonyms, such as Trousseau Gris for Gray Riesling and Muscat Yellow for Moscato Gaillo.


Frank: Big business. No wonder Nancy wants immigrants to pick the crops. I mean, what else could they do? It isn’t as though they could enter the country, go to Massachusetts, get a job, get an education, start a business, become successful, and start a vineyard on, of all places, Martha’s Vineyard, where recent immigrants were personae non grata. I mean, they’re grape pickers in her mind, aren’t they? Suited to pick crops, maybe to do her ironing, and possibly cook for her. Talk about stereotyping! Talk about racism! Talk about demeaning an entire population! But it’s the conservatives who are racists—has to be. The President said so, and just about every mainstream media pundit echoes that as an indisputable fact. 


Gerard: Anyway, looks as though Nancy and the Democrats have a plan for four or five million immigrants, one that will be good for them and good for Nancy. And that work of picking grapes will have job security. Almost a million acres of vineyard in California alone at four thousand grapes per acre…that’s…Holy Cow! That’s a really big number of grapes. FOUR BILLION!


Frank: Now you see why a vineyard owner like Nancy Pelosi and many of the owners of the 3,000-plus wineries in California probably have no problem with illegal immigration. Keep ‘em comin’ and keep ‘em pickin’.


Gerard: You know, all this talk about grapes has made me thirsty for some wine. Am I a hypocrite if I go out to buy a bottle of California wine for supper tonight. The missus likes white, but I prefer red regardless of the meal. Take it like medicine, you know, for the Resveratrol…source of antioxidants and all that.


Frank: You’ll be no more hypocritical than some wealthy celebrity flying off in a private jet to discuss climate change at a conference that serves expensive wines made from grapes picked by illegal migrants in the service of Nancy Pelosi and her Napa Valley cronies.




*April 21, 2020. California Department of Food and Agriculture. California Grape Acreage Report, 2019 Summary. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/California/Publications/Specialty_and_Other_Releases/Grapes/Acreage/2020/202004grpacSUMMARY2019Crop.pdf   Accessed October 1, 2022.

Nothing like having a President asking a dead woman to join him on stage (Ah! The power of the position!). “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” (Aside: she died in a car accident that prompted condolences from the White House—someone should have reminded POTUS) Well, almost nothing like that gaffe. Biden also asked a man in a wheel chair to stand for recognition: "Chuck, Stand Up, Let Them See Ya!” And remember this one? "In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking.”


Go ahead, slap your forehead. I just did. Could President Gaffe and Vice President Word Salad-n-Chef be “in real life” as foolish as they sound in public?


While standing on the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone, Vice President Harris said, “The United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea.” Among her profundities is her statement that a banana is a banana—sorry, not that, but rather, “community banks are in the community.” One can get dizzy listening to her circularity. "I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.” The lyrics of “You Spin Me Round (like a Record)” by Dead and Alive summarize the Vice President’s words on almost every subject she has addressed in public:
    
    You spin me right round, baby
    Right round like a record, baby
    Right round round round
    You spin me right round, baby
    Right round like a record, baby
    Right round round round


Oh! Did I mention that the Vice President’s words “spin me right round”? 


I suppose those who say, “Well, these are just little slip ups,” can’t be convinced that on the world stage the staging of words matters.

It took us centuries, nay millennia, to encapsulate our problems in myth and then in psychology and eventually in neuroscience, but here we are, the latter two mechanisms for self-understanding rooted ofttimes in those mythical origins like the story of Pandora’s opening the pithos (storage jar, not pyxis, “casket” translated as “box”), for example. Today, one of those ancient Greek myths seems to be as good an explanation as any for the widespread contention fostered by mainstream and social media.


The goddess Nemesis (the Distributor) symbolizes indignation and/or retribution. Her role as a distributor was to oversee a balance between happiness and misery, keeping both check when either tended to dominate human affairs. Like other mythical characters, Nemesis has undergone change, but also like others she represents one or two underlying themes or sets of themes. In the instance of Nemesis, one persistent theme is proportion or equilibrium: One can’t be too happy for long or too sad for long. Nemesis as a distributor of both keeps both in check. Biblical Job is an example. He was up, way up, rich and happy before he was down, way down, destitute and unhappy. And then he was up again.


Nemesis also represents indignation. And as such, she seems especially germane to our times because all around us we see indignation based on an unequal distribution of happiness. Nowhere is this more apparent than in politics and political commentary. Everyone is indignant. Everyone is unhappy with the happiness of others. Nemesis is busy keeping happiness and misery in balance, or she is busy distributing indignation. Maybe it was an easier task when the world had fewer people in ancient times; today’s billions under the influence of propaganda or advocacy from one side or the other are difficult to control.


In American politics (probably in every country’s politics) indignation prevails, and neither side of any political divide seems to understand the indignation on the other side. You can find numerous examples deeply rooted in certain issues: Climate, abortion, crime, sanctuary, health care, taxes, intrusive government, justice, gender, education, and war. The happiness on one side engenders indignation on the other: Biological males using female facilities pleasing some and threatening others; gender propaganda in the classroom pleasing some and threatening others; socialism pleasing some and threatening others. Every issue listed above is a focus for similar indignation. The happiness born of the successes on one side engenders unhappiness on the other. The unhappiness manifests itself in a common complaint: Hypocrisy—that is, the ostensible hypocrisy of the “other side.”


Finding Nemesis in her role as an equalizer is an ongoing task. She always seems to be missing for one group or another. But finding her in her role as a distributor of indignation is easy. She’s right there in front of us, all around us, and definitely on mainstream and social media.

A couple of decades ago—or more, I can’t remember—the university where I worked decided to revamp the general curriculum—a rather periodic process in universities as they attempt to correct the ineffective general curricula adopted in their previous revamping. I remember two major curriculum revisions and a couple of minor ones during my four decades in academia. Driven by perceptions that students were not reaching the erudition promised by the universities and by shifting national, state, and local standards, those motivated to change general curricula usually succumbed to the prevailing avant-garde movements, most of them based on tried-but-not-true temporary experiments run in schools from kindergarten through first-year college. Of course, history shows that curriculum revisions are the stuff of burgeoning managerial staffs, each new position requiring in a world that produces no physical gizmo some proof of worth, some reason for the managers to hold their jobs.


Curricula revisions aren’t just a recent phenomenon. Someone way back, maybe even at Bologna, where the modern university system arguably started, probably said after about a half millennium of same-old-same-old, “Should we incorporate this new information…allora…this Galilean stuff into what we teach?” And later, “Should we incorporate this…allora…Newtonian stuff into what we teach?” All the while the idea of a commonly held body of knowledge persisted: Basic readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic, the skills needed by everyone to survive among “civilized” people. Yet, how to acquire those skills became increasingly a matter of trial-and-error, with error being the key focus of faculty a couple of decades after introducing a revision to the curriculum.


Thus, Americans experimented with such novelties as open classrooms, outcome-based education, and even student-designed curricula. In the 1970s, under the push by a few in my university, the administration settled for a while on allowing students to choose whatever courses outside their majors they wanted to take, a policy that led to emptied Composition 101, Introduction to Philosophy, and Biology and Physics 100-level classes and filled Batik and Tie Dying classes as the process from the student’s perspective became one of acquiring not knowledge, but rather credits. After a period of worsening student performance, the administrators—again eager to show they were on top of modernizing—decided it was time to revamp again. The last major revamping in my career centered on “teaching across the curriculum,” a philosophy that tried to reassemble the cracked egg’s spilled specializations.

So, at my university, the general curriculum was supposed to center on certain fundamental skills and themes, skills like writing, reading, and math-ing being applied to five chosen themes. Energy was not among the themes. I argued that there was no more cogent theme than energy. But the illustrious committee rejected energy as a theme that should run through all major curricula.

Quick, name something you can do without energy. Right, you can’t even think without the expenditure of energy. All that stuff you eat goes into energy production--for which the brain thanks the mouth and the body's distribution system. Without energy you are no more active than a rubber chicken--and even that analogy limps since the molecules in the chicken constantly vibrate.

And yet all of the committee members who rejected the theme of energy had either lived through or been born during the Carter years. Energy if you remember the most famous equation ever written is the other side of the Cosmic Coin. But lost in the intellectual movements of the day, my colleagues put curricular focus elsewhere, leaving students of a generation or two to discover on their own the significance of energy in their lives and in the life of their civilization.


As one who did research for the now defunct Pennsylvania Energy Office, I think I gained some sense of energy’s role in maintaining the Commonwealth. From studies on coal, greenhouse gases, and green technologies, I realized that prudent energy policy on a state and federal level is as important to the life of the people as a whole as energy policy is for individuals and families. The effect of high energy costs, for example, reveals itself in fewer leisure trips and more expensive products. That just seems to be commonsense. But it isn’t, at least it isn’t for the people running a number state governments and running the federal government. And I wonder whether someone like the Transportation Secretary and the Governor of California were part of a student body who never learned much about energy because they were learning about how utopian the world would be if only we could rid ourselves of fossil fuels so we could save the planet. And the lessons on energy that might have been learned if it were a principal topic in college might have even been absorbed by the President as he went through school at the same time I was in college.


Now, I’ll admit that typically only those involved in majors like physics, chemistry, biology, and geology (particularly petroleum technology) had some focus on energy in the past. Possibly economics majors also perceived its importance, but I have my doubts on the familiarization with the subject among those taking courses in the humanities and the social sciences. So, here we are, decades after Jimmy Carter initiated a Department of Energy, and just a couple years after energy independence, finding ourselves as a nation once again importing energy—into a country whose energy resources are immense.


But I’m not arguing that those enormous reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas are the only sources on which Americans should rely. Instead, I’m arguing that necessity is the mother of invention and that it is a mother who discovers as they behave what her children need. In other words, when little Johnny is listless, he might have a vitamin B-12 deficiency, so Mom needs to give him some. She sees the symptom, and reacts with a cure. Not so with the listlessness in the Biden economy and under the Biden energy policies. 


We have a whole country that has a symptom caused by a deficiency, but Mother Joe, Mother Pete, and all the other Administration Mothers can’t recognize their children are ailing or see the cause of their lethargy—the Administration’s own folly hampering domestic energy production and relying on foreign sources while trying to make an abrupt change to “green” energy in underdeveloped technologies and insufficient infrastructure. Like university administrations and faculty, the current Biden Administration wants to rewrite the curriculum, the energy plan, based on the ideals of the day. But as every generation discovers, the ideal often conflicts with the real, and changes made because of contemporary ideas, don’t necessarily result in improvements—as educators have discovered through many curricula revisions.


It’s the same old, same old. Maybe one of Christ’s parables sums it up. In Luke 16: 19-27, Jesus tells of the rich man and Lazarus, the pauper at his gate. When the two die, the poor guy goes to the “bosom of Abraham,” whereas the rich guy goes to Hell. So, the rich guy asked Abraham to send someone to warn his five living brothers to change their ways. “And Abraham said to him, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hearken to them.’ But the rich guy says, ‘No, Father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ But he says to him, ‘If they do not hearken to Moses and the Prophets, they will not believe even if someone rises form the dead.’”


One wonders. If those who suffered through the energy crisis of the Carter years, could rise to speak their wisdom to the Biden Administration, would anyone hearken? Probably not. After all, Biden himself lived through the high inflation and energy woes of the Carter years. He certainly can’t hear the voices of the prophets of that day, and obviously he can’t remember—he does have like that rich man in the parable a beach house worth two million or more in Delaware, and he seems unlikely to have seen the “Lazuruses” on the ground outside his gate. He has, like those universities, decided to try what hasn’t worked before or what is based on ideals without proven sustainable successes because he, like those university administrators, believes “it will work this time.” Except that the last revamping of the energy sector that actually led to energy independence and net exporting of energy instead of importing is the very policy he overturned. It’s as though the university finally devised a curriculum that achieved the goal of erudition among its students and then went to the unsuccessful curricula designs of the past. 


All the words have been spoken. The “Moseses” and other “Prophets” plus the actual history of the American energy sector has stood as a lesson for decades. It’s a fundamental lesson, one that transcends the vicissitudes of a managerial class seeking to prove they know better than their forebears and that they are wise. But just as readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic have been staples of education for centuries, so prudent energy policy, not fashionable energy policy, is the only way to achieve economic stability now and into the future. Energy, can’t live without it. Hearken!

Twenty-first century people face a big list of moral dilemmas.


1) Should Iranian women burn their headscarves and protest in the streets because Tehran’s morality police killed Mahsa Amini, the young woman caught in public without the full hijab attire? Should they protest publicly even when doing so means risking their own lives? 2) Should the Patriarch of Moscow condemn the wanton destruction and death caused by his friend and benefactor Vladimir Putin? Should he say Mass in that beautiful new cathedral dedicated to the military that Putin built for him? 3) Should Americans generously and freely provide all immigrants with housing, health care, phones, education, and protection? Should they do that personally, or should they just have the government do that for them and avoid the inconvenience of doing so face-to-face? And should the people of Martha’s Vineyard cast out 53 migrants from an island that somehow handles over 100,000 tourists each summer on the grounds that the island has insufficient facilities? And what about New York City? Should the city house immigrants bussed from border states in the newly formed Bidenville tent city, where the large tents can sleep 1,000 on cots barrack style? 4) Should the UN cast Russian ambassadors out onto the streets of the East Side and off the Security Council? Or should the ambassadors of all the countries ignore Putin’s threat of nuclear war and sit by idly while discussing the so-called existential threat of climate change? 5) Is climate change a moral issue as some argue? Have you switched completely from fossil fuels to Solar, Hydro, nuclear, or gerbil power yet? 6) Should felons run free rather than pay bail? Should any legislator, prosecutor, judge, or parole board suffer any consequences of decisions that allowed violent offenders to reoffend upon release under the no bail policies? 7) Should Catholic priests and evangelical ministers condemn the support so many in their congregations give to abortion and by doing so risk seeing less money in their collections? 8) Is human life an inalienable right? Or, is human life an arbitrarily defined entity dependent for its value and right on the opinion du jour and in situ? 9) Should biological men be allowed to use women’s restrooms or locker rooms because they declare themselves to be women? is this a moral issue or just one involving an open or closed toilet seat? 10) Is censorship by the few a sufficient guide to rectitude for the many? 11) Should you buy a product—regardless of your desire or need for it—from a “woke” company that operates on values you do not perceive to be moral or ethical? 12) Should you respectfully bury recently deceased Aunt Zelda or put her body in the composting pile as you are allowed to do in California, Washington, Colorado, Vermont, and Oregon? If a human body now has thousands of synthetic--many carcinogenic-- compounds from plastics and other sources, is composting really a way of saving the environment and humanity? Or will Aunt Zelda's body poison the kale served at an upscale bistro next year? 13) ... 


No doubt you can list other dilemmas we twenty-first century people face.

Ah! The threats. The desperation. The folly.
So, once again, on this day before fall, Vladimir Putin is threatening the use of nuclear weapons. How frightening! Especially for Russians, who will almost assuredly receive radioactive fallout from their own weapons. Then again, who’s to count the cancer victims and those dying rapidly from radioactive isotopes stripping electrons from the atoms in their bodies. Ionizing radiation? It’s as invisible as the wind.

What’s that? What are you saying?

Basically, that Vlad needs a lesson in meteorology, specifically in low and high pressure systems and the breezes they generate within a prevailing wind system. Ignorance is bliss until it isn’t.

In January the winds of Ukraine generally sheer, with northern Ukraine experiencing a west wind and southern Ukraine, an east wind, and eastern Ukraine getting a more northerly wind. In spring, northern, eastern, and southern Ukraine get eastern winds, whereas in southwestern Ukraine, winds generally flow from the south and southeast. By July, the prevailing winds change again as west and northwest winds prevail. Fall sees a trend back toward the winter wind regime. Within this general trend various high and low pressure systems, swirling clockwise and counterclockwise respectively because of the Coriolis effect in the Northern Hemisphere, alter local and regional wind directions.

Today’s (September 20) wind map reveals two wind gyres, both counterclockwise, indicating a double low pressure over Ukraine. Thus, winds over the country flow both from Belarus and into southern Russia.
What if Putin dropped a couple of nukes today—or any day? The result would be the spread of radioactive isotopes into the Crimea in the southeast, Belarus to the north, and into regions southeast of Moscow. Meteorology be damned! Putin says he isn’t bluffing about nuclear weapons as he conscripts more Russians into military service to replace the thousands lost in his “special engagement” to date. And that means that those soldiers—those Russian soldiers—sent to fight in Ukraine will also come under radioactive fallout. So will the soils of Ukrainian wheat fields. And cities like Savastopol, Karch, and Feodosia—those three accounting for about 700,000 Crimeans. Of course, Russian cities like Volgograd, with more than a million people, will also receive the unwanted radiation.

And if the winds shift as they inevitably do, will Moscow get a dose of its own radioactive isotopes? Certainly, it and neighboring Belarus will receive some radioactive fallout. Yet, a belligerent Putin continues his threats, and a compliant Belarus shows support.
Will he use nukes? I have no idea. Desperate men do desperate things. We can generalize as we do with regard to prevailing wind systems, but general wind systems do not preclude aberrations in wind directions. One can live within a region of Prevailing Westerlies and still get eastern, southern, and northern winds.

It’s truly unfortunate that most of the 7.8 billion people on the planet have no power to impose sanity where insanity reigns. Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo began a world war in which more than 50 million people died. How many of us will Putin kill to satisfy his aggrandizement? How many will be Russians? And after he is dead, how many of his and other Russians’ offspring will suffer from cancer that his actions initiated.

The winds of today are not necessarily the winds of tomorrow. What blows today might blow back tomorrow. Vlad needs a lesson in meteorology.

Salem, Massachusetts, has an infamous past. Numerous accusations of witchcraft resulted in deaths of 25 innocent people accused of consorting with the devil. Arthur Miller dramatized the events of 1692-93 in The Crucible, a play that is required reading in many high schools, making that brief segment of American history available to those who paid attention in class or read through the Spark Notes. One might think that since 1711, when the Salem community voted to restore the good names of the accused and especially since 1957, when Massachusetts formally apologized for the hangings, that the Salem story is just history. But, in fact, Salem is an ongoing story. In  2017 Zambian police arrested four “witch hunters” and charged them with murder. Eight years earlier  people in Papua New Guinea burned to death a girl, a father, and his son, all accused of practicing witchcraft. A little research uncovers more such twenty-first century stories, including those of Nigerian “witches.” Yes, Salem lives on. And in the United States, where Salem lies, such destructive lies about others persist.


Although there are still places where the cry “Witch, Witch!” drives people to ostracize and murder their neighbors, the accusation has multiple variations, all of them causing hardship and harm. In the United States, the word witch has been replaced in recent times by racist and a number of words that end in -phobe (xenophobe, for example). Whether or not the accused is racist or phobic is irrelevant. What matters, as it mattered in 1692, is the accusation. Once out, it becomes a reality. And that new reality drives paranoia and subsequent injustice.


When the President of the United States labels an entire group of citizens terrorists, extremists, threats, racists, and Nazis, he sets in motion a process that is no different from what occurred in Salem. Truth and specificity never guide those who stereotype. Rational engagement dies with accusations of witchcraft in any of its supposed spectral manifestations. Today, just wearing a MAGA hat has led to abusive reactions by a paranoid public, reactions that have ranged from verbal to physical attacks on the accused. Is the American President alone in his paranoia? According to National Geographic online, “President Yahya Jammeh of The Gambia believes he is being targeted by witches. According to Amnesty International, as many as 1,000 Gambians accused of witchcraft have been arrested and tortured on orders from the president.” *


“Can’t happen here,” you say, even though videos are readily available showing the American version of TV personalities crying “witch”—i.e. “racist.” Is the American president different from The Gambia’s president? “How dare you ask?” you inquire. This is America; we don’t arrest and torture here. We don’t burn people at the stake.


But do we ruin their names? Do we send the IRS in for an audit or to punish as seems to have happened under Lois Lerner and other government agents? Do we send in the FBI over political disagreements? Remember that chief among the reparations made to the victims of the Salem Witch Trials was the restoration of names, that is, the restoration of reputations. In an age of widespread social media, how does one restore a ruined reputation? Once out, the accusation becomes the reputation, and the subsequent condemnation it elicits entrenches itself like a World War I soldier at the Front.


Those who bear false witness are chief among hypocrites, and the only way to stop the injustice they perpetrate seems to lie in counter accusations, a process that helped to end those Salem witch trials so long ago. In Massachusetts, Governor Phipps stopped the arrests for witchcraft and terminated the trials after his own wife was questioned by the witch hunters.


Will the false accusations ever stop? Probably not. Statista online ** documents that 21% of Americans believe in spells and witchcraft. I do not know how many Americans believe that those who favor small and unobtrusive government are “a threat to democracy” as the President has stated, but it is not unreasonable to assume they number in the millions. Salem of 1692 has re-emerged in this century, and all Americans now belong to a community of paranoid neighbors primed to cast accusations.




*National Geographic Resource Library. Witch Trials in the 21st Century: Accusations of witchcraft persist. Online at https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/witch-trials-21st-century/. Accessed September 21, 2022.


**https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272243/belief-in-spells-or-witchcraft-in-the-united-states/  Accessed September 21, 2022.