When senior government officials make it damned clear they will reject any facts that contradict their “I’ve already made up my mind” positions, how do we expect what they want to do to work? We went into that costly Iraq War, which totally failed as the ISIL attacks against a failed Iraqi state evidence, the administration just rejected any facts (supplied by their own government experts!) that told them that they were about to enter into an historical and cultural nightmare that would never resolve in our favor.
When government policies cut student loans (take a look at the recent budget extension bill which already impales meagre Pell financial aid by a further $300 million), allow even state college tuitions to fly above affordability, as bankruptcy laws specifically take away potential relief to students with stupid levels of debt, and cut public primary and secondary school budgets just as statistics show how un-competitive American kids are when compared to their international counterparts… how do our leaders really think we are going to create solid, globally-competitive jobs for generations to come?
Why do we think that crumbling bridges, highways, dams and levees will sustain against increasingly harsh weather patterns? Remember how much damage Hurricane Katrina created, not from the direct impact of the winds and rain, but from the failed levees that resulted in massive flooding. Think of the damage, for example, should earthquakes slam into the earthen levees and crumbling 19th century additions that control the water systems in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, one of the largest sources of water for so many cities and regions around the state. Such a disaster would devastate the regional economy for years if such water supplies were cut. That in turn would tank the national economy shortly thereafter. An ounce of prevention…
That companies that pollute, wreaking havoc with both local communities and the greater climate change issue, but do not have to pay for the true economic cost of their profit-making efforts, that wealth has institutionalized greater power, lower taxes and enhanced exemption from regulation than either average citizens or comparable wealth-holders in other developed nation is stunning. The erosion of our middle class and the continued fall of buying power for average Americans are increasingly blamed on “government intervention” into the private sector, but eliminating those elements of government policy that actually support this inherent unfairness are “off the table” among those in charge.
That the notion of “one person, one vote” has left the building in the cacophony of gerrymandering and voter ID laws, even under the very notion of the Constitution itself (two senators from each state regardless of population), and that our Constitution is hopelessly out of date and virtually impossible to change (the 27th Amendment, the last change dealing with Congressional pay, was proposed in 1789 and became a part of the Constitution in 1992!) only seem to make matters that much worse.
It’s clear that we are living in treacherous times, our economy is not sailing into the “place it’s been before,” Americans (except those at the top of the food chain) are learning to do with less… often much, much less… all has led to a malaise of increasing hopelessness, which has in turn pushed many Americans into a belief system that relies rather significantly on divine intervention to correct. That trend has also taken its toll on common sense, distracted the business of government into wasteful religious debate that seems to fly in the face of our First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Nothing illustrates this divisive issue like the battles within school boards about the necessity of adding “creationism” to local school curricula to counter religiously unpopular evolution theory. In a lightly-publicized debate in early 2014 between an evolutionary scientific educator (Bill Nye) and a well-recognized spokesman for creationism (Ken Ham) at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, the struggle between common sense and fiercely-held but contradictory religiosity raged.
“Ken Ham used his interpretation of Genesis to argue against evolution. He claims all animals on Earth descended from around 10,000 distinct, divinely created animal kinds, splitting apart through minor adaptations into the more than 10 million species alive today. He argued that the universe is less than seven thousand years old and that Earth's surface was destroyed four thousand years ago in a cataclysmic global flood.
“Ken Ham is not alone… [T]here are many people I still know and respect who agree with these beliefs deeply. Young Earth Creationism only emerged to begin disputing mainstream geology, archeology, and astronomy in the early 1960s, but today one-third of Americans believe earth is only thousands of years old, with even more doubting evolutionary common descent. Government-funded schools in 13 different states teach forms of creationism. Ham's views may seem unbelievable to many, but he is the representative of a sincere and passionate movement.
“As the representative of mainstream science, Bill Nye took a shotgun approach to the debate, bringing up multiple lines of evidence demonstrating the ideas creationists most often dispute. He brought a piece of rock from the strata that run directly underneath the Creation Museum, asking how the football-field-deep limestone bed -- filled with alternating layers of microscopic fossil creatures that could have only lived and died in calm, shallow water -- could have formed in a year-long global flood. He showed photos of annually-deposited ice cores 680,000 layers thick. He showed how the worldwide distribution of fossils is consistent with animals evolving in the same regions they inhabit today, rather than migrating out from the Middle East in pairs after a global flood. He pointed out that fossils only exist in the layers evolution predicts, that the stars are too far away for their light to have reached Earth in only 6000 years, and that the atomic clocks of radiometric dating are consistent and reliable.
“But creationism isn't successful because it ignores the evidence. It doesn't. Creationism is successful because it consistently finds ways to reinterpret the evidence to fit its presuppositions. Throughout the debate, Ken Ham insistently repeated that although scientific research in the present is testable and repeatable, scientific inquiry into the past -- what he calls ‘historical science’ -- can never be proven and is always open to interpretation. This belief may seem odd to many, but for people who grew up with creationism, it makes perfect sense.” David MacMillan writing for the Huffington Post, April 14th. Couldn’t God have created evolution?
How exactly are students who are taught “have faith without proof” creationism expected to rise into a world of scientific and engineering greatness, testing the boundaries of human knowledge and experience, questioning what is or is not possible, into order to create the new solutions, the new technologies that might lift the United States back into a position of economic growth and greatness that built this great country in the first place?
It is interesting to note that this anti-scientific notion of creationism arose after the United States had achieved its political and economic global greatness, and that there is an almost direct statistical link between the rise of support for creationism and the relative economic and political decline we have experienced in the last two decades. Without that questioning spirit, anchored in common sense and empirical facts, what chance does this country have in remaining a leader in technology and problem-solving?
I’m Peter Dekom, and unless and until we reintroduce common sense into our governance, we can expect the malevolent decline in our position as a world leader, the continuing rise of hopelessness, to define America’s future until out political time on this planet expires into the dust of recorded history.
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