Friend Adaire's Easter, 2018 Post:
I grew up in a family of 5 kids that was boisterous and lively and fun. A lot of my family is gone now and those that are not live a distance away. I miss family gatherings especially around holidays. If you have family close by, I hope you all celebrate life together every chance you get. It is short and surely sweet! Do something good for someone today.
Pam C
I too had 5 kids in my family. It was loud but I would never call it fun. To this day there is competition, back stabbing, lying, greed. I have had to divorce myself from most of them to keep myself sane. I was the only one to go to college ( thank you mom! Who sent me even though she didn’t believe in education at all). I am such a supporter of a good college education. It changes you. Without it I’d probably be in the middle of the scrabble with the rest of them. Enjoy your sweet memories if your childhood was fun. Every child deserves that.
Alan Archibald
Thank you Pam C. for posting your appreciation of college education. (As it happens, I too am one of five kids.)
Tragically, we are living in a recurrent historical moment when poorly-educated pseudo-populists disguise their fascist leanings with chatter about "making America great again."
Notably, Hitler used the phrase "make Germany great again" - and, even more notably, Trump's first wife, Ivana, reported that Donald would read from Hitler's collected speeches, a copy of which he stored in a bedside cabinet. (Yes, this fact checks.)
A large part of being educated is that college students who successfully learn to navigate "the world of ideas" also learn the importance of "fact-checking," whereas "the under-educated" (including poorly-educated college grads) are determined to assemble deliberately-shattered fragments of truth (then mingle them with whole-cloth lies, "alternative facts" and Trumpian "fake news") in order to bolster prior ideological and religious convictions... substantive Truth be damned.
A simple litmus to separate truth-seekers from "ideological-and-religious cheats" is that the former know enough to visit Snopes.com to examine any claim that sounds even slightly suspicious.
Lamentably, ideological cheats do not want to know the Truth. They prefer comforting falsehoods.
As an illustration, consider "What The Heil?"
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/make-germany-great-again/
Although H.G. Wells' body of work as a historian was praised by Albert Einstein, Wells is best-remembered for his ground-breaking science fiction novels: "The Island of Doctor Moreau," "The Invisible Man" and "The War of the Worlds."
Wells made a pertinent observation in "The Outline Of History," published in 1920: "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe..."
Although I would also like to probe the nature of "Bad Religion," that undertaking would raise too many hackles and distract from the essential truth that many people (a disproportionate number of them "under-educated") want to be lied to.
And it's not because they are innocently ignorant.
They are agressively ignorant... boastfully ignorant... evangelically ignorant.
They fear education like someone who has spent his entire life in pitch darkness fears The Light.
On the other hand, college education (when fully engaged) teaches us to welcome all kinds of illumination, regardless its source. (Trump, for example, is right that Amazon does not pay its fair share of taxes. Donald was also right that The Iraq War was totally bogus.)
As for "competition, back stabbing, lying (and) greed," I observe that these characteristics frequently manifest among people who never "got a life" and consequently try to fill that void with petty drama.
Although college education is not a panacea, it tends to foster rich lives -- vocationally and avocationally -- so that people do not default to "queen bee" and "king bee" posturing.
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