Circle game: The past few years have revealed much. But what have we learned?

Depending on your level of pessimism, from very little to exactly the wrong things.

Fall is in Idaho, right up behind the Grom, cycle, guitar, and llama ranch.

The snow’s on its way up here in the mountains. The shorter fall days, the falling leaves, and the cool, crisp air all portend what is to come. Winter in the Northern Rockies arrives much earlier than it should according to the calendar on the wall, and once here, it lasts a long, long time. The mountain trails whisper on my final visits of the year that it’s nearly time for the long winter slumber. Months of cold and darkness will pass while they rest beneath the snow.

There’s a metaphor here for our own lives, the circle game, but only once around for us. We enter the world in our own version of spring, which is all too short. Summer is on us before we can even yell for help. Fall lasts a while, but one can already feel the pull of winter throughout. When winter does arrive, it’s without the reprieve of another spring. Who the hell knows what’s next? I sure don’t.

What I suspect is that it won’t be that long until my atoms dissociate and simply go back to the stars from where they came. If consciousness is, indeed, something more than just a trick to make reality tolerable, I reckon that I’ll know soon enough. I’d like to think so. But that’s probably not right.

The truth is probably as simple as: from dust we came, and to dust we will return. It’s one of the few things in any holy book that I’m down with. I just wish that we could learn enough to pass useful information along to our descendants to make their lives easier. On that as well, I’m starting to have my doubts.

The current government shutdown is now of historic length. What interests me about the shutdown is the degree to which it has revealed how deeply the federal government has embedded itself in the lives of far too many people. Here in Idaho, there are valid concerns over things like SNAP benefits. But if social safety nets were controlled by state and local governments instead of the feds, the shutdown wouldn’t be a problem in that regard—at least not everywhere all at once.

Every administration led by a Democrat (and one by a Republican) in this century has increased the number of people who depend on or answer to the federal government for things mentioned nowhere in our constitution. The No Child Left Behind Act, the Affordable Care Act, the Build Back Better Act, and enough bureaucratic missives that no one voted for to create a paper trail from here to the Oort Cloud have left far too many of us little choice but to dance to whatever tune the feds call.

The problem isn’t the shutdown; it’s that the shutdown makes such a difference to so many. What’s worse is the number of people who seem unaware of how far our federal government has strayed from the intentions of our founders. Unchecked, this won’t end well.

I’ve been thinking about all of this in the context of the COVID pandemic. Both COVID and the current shutdown revealed a lot about the fabric of our country in the 21st century. Almost none of it is good. But one thing stands out as especially not good.

COVID revealed, among other things, the depths to which our once envy-of-the-world system of education has sunk. And the trend lo these past several decades is even more concerning than the result. In every human endeavor in which performance may be measured over time—athletic ability, wealth, health, longevity—vast advancements have been achieved, save one: education.

At a time when we ought to be raising educational standards as the result of all manner of advances in knowledge, we are, in fact, lowering them. COVID laid this bare. Some of this lowering (or outright abolition) of standards was due to wokeness—something easily addressed if that were the end of it. But it’s not. The rot goes much deeper.

We’ve had to redefine what constitutes merit across the board in America because our system of education is in free fall. Standards aren’t what they once were—not only in education but also in hiring, advancement, military recruiting, and other areas that rely on education to produce useful outcomes in learning, work ethic, basic competence, etc.

At Harvard, the average undergraduate course grade these days is an “A.” This appears to be predicated on the assumption that anyone virtuous enough to be accepted at Harvard must be an “A” student—and little else. This practice might seem like a weird, La-La Land one-off, but many K-12 schools operate on the same wavelength. It’s socially harmful, as the paradigm goes, for students to experience anything other than success and affirmation, no matter how insufficient their efforts. This is a recipe straight out of the Dunning-Kruger cookbook for social catastrophe.

Modern pedagogy largely forbids failure, despite it being a very effective teaching tool. Yeah, failure stings, but that’s part of the lesson. In the real world, where natural selection exists (whether you acknowledge it or not), how is one expected to figure much out without having to work harder, become smarter, adapt, or develop a new plan?

How is anyone supposed to chart their best path through life without identifying their strengths and weaknesses? One’s optimal career lies along the intersection between the plane of their desires and the plane of their abilities. The odds are against landing on the yellow brick road on the first try. Without the incentive to improve, without effort, without figuring out what to do when things go wrong, and without trial and error, very little is likely to be accomplished in terms of personal growth and enlightenment. Our educational system is currently designed to produce lost souls wandering the face of the earth and little more.

Kurt Vonnegut envisioned such a scenario in his 1968 short story "Harrison Bergeron," set in the year 2081. The title character, Harrison Bergeron, is a handsome, bright, and athletic teen. For his gifts, he’s forced to endure extreme measures designed to blunt his natural gifts.

In this story, to ensure that no individual feels slighted over intelligence, beauty, or athleticism, the U.S. government enforces a system of handicaps. Individuals are forced to wear masks, listen to distracting sounds, or carry heavy weights to diminish any advantages. Anyone who is talented or gifted in any way attracts the attention of Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers.

Substitute 2020 for 2081, woke for handicapped, and liberal Karen scolds for Diana Moon Glampers and you’ve got Vonnegut’s dystopian vision brought to life.

I’m reading in today’s newspapers about the number of people who are shocked, shocked, that Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist and obvious blockhead, is now the mayor-elect of NYC.

How could this have happened? I’ll tell you how—those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. There’s a lot of that out there.

The coalition that elected Mamdani includes many people who are ignorant of or indifferent to American exceptionalism and clueless to the uniqueness of the American experiment. That’s bad now, but what happens in another few decades when a critical mass of the American people outside of blue cities don’t know or don’t care about our foundational ideals, our Bill of Rights, or the rule of law? What happens to America then?

In 1982, Columbian drug lord and narcoterrorist Pablo Escobar was elected to the Columbian Chamber of Representatives—their version of our House of Representatives. Escobar, a brutal sociopath, was elected as a member of the Liberal Party despite being well-known as the founder of the Medellín Cartel because he was considered a “Robin Hood” among the poor for handouts. When the Columbian National Police ultimately killed him in 1993, over 25,000 people attended his funeral.

That’s what happens when “don’t know,” “don’t care,” or both catch up with current events. About the only outcomes our current system of education in this country is producing consistently are “don’t know” and “don’t care.”

What has this wrought? Profound ignorance, emotional fragility, the inability to sort out things more complicated than a license plate number, and entitlement.

Perhaps that’s why there is distressingly little curiosity over the actual origins of COVID. Perhaps that’s why someone espousing a widely discredited social and economic theory of governance was just elected mayor of our largest city. Perhaps that’s why both political parties in this country keep getting away with blowing up political norms when they are in power and those norms get in the way of what they want. Perhaps that’s why we are generally governed by nimrods.

Yesterday, I came across a YouTube interview of Mike Rowe with a vaccine skeptic. Mike Rowe is, IMO, one of our most steadfast and hopeful cultural icons. Yet Rowe saw fit to share his hugely influential platform with an idiot, who lambasted vaccines because of what he claims are nefarious ingredients in them. It was the old trick of calling water dihydrogen monoxide to make it sound scary. I’m disappointed that Rowe fell for it.

That’s the lasting damage of COVID—even level-headed people like Mike Rowe don’t know who to listen to anymore. I don’t care if there’s rattlesnake piss in a polio vaccine. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to take it because I’m old enough to have seen what the alternative, polio, did to kids my age.

There is no such thing as a substance that is 100% safe to put into your body (including dihydrogen monoxide), but 99.9% is pretty good odds—especially when compared to the alternative. Good luck explaining any of that to anyone born after 1990.

That’s why if there is an afterlife, I’m reasonably sure that there is a circle in hell reserved just for Anthony Fauci. Science is hard; our education system is soft, and Fauci happened to be right at the nexus of “don’t know” and “don’t care.” So now even intelligent people are questioning the safety and efficacy of one of the greatest medical triumphs of the 20th century.

So, what have we learned? In the case of Mamdani, not much. In the case of vaccines, exactly the wrong lessons. It goes on and on. And thanks to lousy pedagogy, help is not on the way.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.