Funding for the EPA will be cut. Tickled pink (oops!) with his new Sharpie, he just dragged his sleeve across the previous "best person's" Clean Water Act

Contributed By:Dorothy Nevils

When I was a kid, our folks reused stuff, not because they were worried about the air we breathed or the food we ate, but because there was an eternal hole in my daddy’s pocket; and my stepmother, no matter how many times she lifted that wooden cover and laid it to the left, and set her foot to peddling underneath, just couldn’t patch that hole! She pumped that treadle up and down, squeezed the 3-in-one religiously, and fixed darn near every rip we kids could produce… but never that seam in the bottom of Daddy’s pocket!

I was a kid, an A student everywhere else, but when it came to mundane stuff, like what kept us alive, I didn’t have a clue! It was not in the “book,” so I spent no time learning it. Somebody else’s territory!

We’re in a similar place today. What we don’t know about doesn’t concern us; and so, whatever happens, happens.

The man the archaic electoral “college” (the etymology being co[together] + legere[together], thus having nothing to do with making sense) chose as the “best person to head our country” just made a decision that affects everybody: Funding for the EPA will be cut. Tickled pink (oops!) with his new Sharpie, he just dragged his sleeve across the previous “best person’s” Clean Water Act, and tossed it – you know, the way you wipe the seat at a rest stop?

My students remember, many of them, the proverb that begins, “He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Shun him.” I think about this often, more now than I did this time last year…or even past years when I tried so desperately to get all my students to read, dig, question, learn… These were the times when it was a bit easier. There weren’t as many distractions. There were enough, but far less than now.

I worry so much now. Those children, now parents and grandparents, have been swept up into an age where things of zero significance entertain the brain, and important matters lie like litter along life’s trail. Things of the flesh fill every “nook and cranny” of attention; and so, we have become, more and more, inattentive.

The television keeps up its constant banter in the bedroom or in the kitchen, background noise as we get on with daily duties, and kids communicate with their peers, texting and even “sexting’ ten feet away, and none of the bunch in the house is conscious of the other. There is no “conversation at the table” because there is no real “table,” just an ornament with four legs and matching chairs. If people dare draw nigh, talk would be an interruption.

So, what do the letters EPA mean? If you don’t know, that’s a problem. That means our children probably don’t know… and how can you care about that which you “know not”?

We are at the mercy of leader(s) who don’t accept the word of scientists – the folk we trust to grow and implant stem cells, to open our skulls, to lay our bridges, to zip us through the air, though our arms lack feathers…

Proof depends on knowledge. Less knowledge = more doubt. Translation: You won’t accept proof that goes beyond what you believe.

I entreat you: Expand your knowledge. Read. Discuss. Question. You know the joke about concern for the hereafter… going into a room and wondering, “What am I here after?”

I, too, am concerned about the hereafter: What will be here… after I am not?

Story Posted:03/04/2017