Patience: Not necessarily a virtue

Patience, goes an old adage, is a virtue. That’s probably true if you’re cooking, but there are a lot more things where patience is a grievous failure.

• It has been almost 19-years since the Columbine school massacre claimed 12-lives, wounded 21 others, and disrupted the lives of thousands more. It has been 11-years since 33-people died at Virginia Tech.

  Today, after more than 2-decades of public massacres, universal background checks and cooling-off periods are a pipedream and village sociopaths wander freely. What good has patience done any of the victims past or, doubtless, future?

• Science accepted evolution as a settled fact more than 100-years ago, and today we have teachers leaving the profession because they can’t take the harassment of pious loonies who insist that Creationism belongs in public schools. We have, too, unethical science teachers who smuggle Creationism into their classes.

  Meantime, American schools have slipped to 37^th globally. That’s no way to prepare for the hyperspeed technological future bearing down on us. What we are preparing the next generation to do is sweep floors on the midnight shift at the Chinese-owned factory — if a robot isn’t doing that, I mean.

  We must stop indulging backward-looking nitwits. Fire the unethical teachers, and make plain to fundamentalist loonies that they are not welcome in polite society.

• The bald fact that Donald Trump was elected president, under the aegis of the Electoral College, points toward two things we need to do — pronto.

  1. Improve citizenship education from grade school onward. Much of the commentary accompanying the 2016 campaign, and subsequent election, made plain that a lot of Americans know next to nothing about their country, either its history or its governance. And, of course, there is the ease with which garish lies by Russian trolls — There are actually Americans who believed that Hilary Clinton and John Podesta were operating a child sex ring out of a Washington-area pizzeria. — influenced people who should have known better. This must be corrected, and the place to do it begins with grade school.

  2. W-a-a-a-y back in the late ’60s, James Michener wrote that the Electoral College was a time bomb just waiting to be triggered, and the national disgrace of Donald Trump — who lost the popular vote by almost 3,000,000-votes, no matter his obscene bellows about illegals — shows that Michener was right. The Constitution must be amended to eliminate the Electoral College.

• In the course of 25-years we have gone from Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress to the televised, overhyped interviews of celebrity porn stars and Playmates.

  Surely it’s time to stop being patient with the unseemly and self-indulgent and demand character in public office?

I can remember when the Internet was made available for public access, how charmed I was. I even got in a public argument with an editor of the Roanoke Times, predicting that the traditional, above-ground media would lose control of both the collection and dissemination of news, and that the consequence would be ruinous for newspapers. That was scarcely any more than 20-years ago.

I track news and technology a lot more closely than most people, so I am not surprised that most people were caught unaware when the ground shifted beneath their feet and they suddenly found themselves living in a Brave New World. That, in combination with the failure of cultural staples like religion, are the locus of much of the world’s instability and reaction against change. Part of me feels some sympathy for them, but only a little; the signs were all there.

No matter. The world has changed, and will continue changing — and with increasing rapidity. Ethical thought is going to change with it, and we need to stop deferring to those who just don’t, can’t, get it.