BLOGS

I honestly had another story planned. Issues in Oklahoma pushed it, and all others up by one day. A feature in BSFS I appreciate. Apocalypse means "uncovering"; "to reveal."

We should, as in Hurricanes Katrina, Rita; Irene, Sandy (albeit politicized and reluctantly) pull together because of E Pluribus Unum: we are "out of many, one." We should start acting like it, and stop treating climate disaster -- whether in Florida/Louisiana/Texas/New York/New Jersey, or now in Oklahoma -- as a regional problem; their problem! Whether we can affect it positively (or not), this is our "new normal." Montgomery Scott is not going to "beam us up." We can bury our heads in the sand and respond (to continued rising costs), or choose to [p]respond: prep for the next inevitable one - flood, hurricane, tornado, wildfire - reducing costs and its aftermath.

Teachers were again the unsung heroes: whether they throw their bodies in front of a hail of bullets in Connecticut; whether they throw their bodies over frightened children during an EF-5 tornado in Oklahoma, they deserve pay comparable to other professions; and for pol trolls to BACK OFF demonizing them as the problem; reducing them to interchangeable parts in a landscape Lego set. The problem is the pols that have all the answers and few with experience - mostly NONE, in front of any level of American classrooms.

I am understandably disappointed when politicians look at tragedy as an "angle" to forward their agendas: disaster relief should not be regional nor demanded concurrent with cuts elsewhere; universal background checks were once supported by the NRA, and now >80% of gun owners. I point these dichotomous events out because the intersecting sets are: they must be voted on. Sandy relief was sadly, initially denied: their problem; not mine.

We are bereft of critical thinking skills since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. We've succumbed to the loudest, shrillest common denominator as the purveyor of "facts" and "news," which I use in quotes, as for some markets, either description is oxymoron. And the shrill influence our legislators not to Jeffersonian heights, but to Sir Francis Bacon's "opinion of the vulgar":

"The human understanding is of no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one would.' For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding." The Interpretation of Nature, XLIX

We are BETTER than this!