Should Smart People's Opinions Have More Weight?

 

Evolution

I was pretty self confident when I got out of college. I didn’t make super grades but I had other interests. I spent a lot of time with friends. I read a lot. I spent a lot of time playing in the orchestra and in doing my comedy routines. But when I went to med school I decided to get serious. I wanted to be a good doctor, so I studied hard and tried to do my best. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t do much better than average. Suddenly I realized that there were just a lot of people smarter than me. It was devastating. I went to the dean and told him I wanted to repeat my freshman year. He told me that I didn’t have to learn everything. What made a good doctor was how he (or she) kept learning after med school. He told me that he wasn’t at the top of his class either. So I continued, doing as well as I could. 

I always remembered that, and throughout my career, I tried to keep reviewing my patients’ conditions, and keeping up with new advances in medicine. But, in the back of my mind, the fear remained that I wasn’t good enough, or that someone smarter might have found something I missed. Some doctors get more confident as they age. Some continue practicing into their nineties. In my case, I continued to doubt myself and as soon as I thought my memory was slipping, I retired. 

I enjoy writing, and I have opinions about almost everything, but the same issue continues to bother me. What right do I have to disagree with someone smarter than me? I realize that you can find smart people on either side of every issue, but that’s no excuse. A smart person has a tremendous advantage. He (or she) can remember more facts related to a given issue.  He can make a better case for his opinion. But there are disadvantages too. A smart person can filter out the facts that don’t support his opinion. And he can rationalize an opinion that’s not supported by the facts. In every field of science, smart people tend to rise to the top. They don’t necessarily take leadership positions, either because they don’t want to, or because they aren’t outgoing, or if, like my wise cousin Steve, they know enough to see that every issue has different sides so they try to remain open minded.  

Also there are many factors that effect people’s opinions regardless of how smart they are. There’s prejudice of all kinds: racial, religious, social. There’s the effect of culture. That’s why Christianity is the main religion in the US and Europe, and Islam is predominant in the mid-east. Then there’s situational effects. I saw it in Vietnam, where the American soldiers tended to look down on Vietnamese lives as worth less than ours, and now in Gaza where the Israelis think their lives are worth more than the Palestinians, attempting to justify killing over 67,000 Palestinians out of revenge for Hamas’ murder of a little over 1000 Israelis. Then there’s money. People with a lot of money often use it to campaign and influence people to support their interests, which may not agree with the interests of the population. 

It's tempting to become egotistical and think you’re smarter than you are, especially if you don’t talk to a lot of people. That’s my situation now.  I’m retired and only have my wise cousin Steve to reign in my self-confidence. Also when you see a smart person who supports your views on TV or read a book that agrees with you, you have a tendency to think you’re just as smart as they are. If you were talking to them in person, you would find out you can’t come up with nearly as clear an argument as they, or as a smart person with the opposite opinion, so you tend to just listen to those who agree with you, and the more you hear, the more confident you are that they (you) are right. Maybe that’s why our society is so polarized. People just listen to those who agree with them, and they are isolated from those who disagree.   

So what can I do? We live in a democracy – so far – so we can vote to express our opinions. In fact, I think we have to vote, to keep unscrupulous people from having their way. Voting is not foolproof. Polls may be wrong, and the majority of people may be misled by lies, selective reporting, or their own prejudices and culture. 

I think the answer is to be very, very careful. Try to verify facts and eliminate prejudice from your reasoning. Listen to smart people, and also those who aren’t so smart. You never know who’s going to be right. Also don’t close your mind. People believed in creationism for millennia before Darwin came along with his theory of evolution. And, I'll have to admit, I still pay more attention to the opinions of smart people. I think if they are honest and have access to the facts, their opinions are worth more than mine. 

Steve, My Wise Cousin Replies

Steve McLean and Robin Gunning

Here's my wise cousin Steve's response to my last blog about the scientific method:

Robin: 

   You question whether the scientific method can be used to examine Trump and his policies. The SM can’t be used to study an irrational process – except to show that it is irrational. I don’t really think that the SM can be used to test human motivations.  You say Trump wants to be a dictator, but he is too old to matter.  He wants more money, but he has more already than he can use.  There is no benefit, so why does he pursue these things. Humans do things that don’t benefit themselves – or anyone else.  People steal because they want something without paying for it – they benefit.  People murder because someone is in their way or for revenge – they benefit.  But – explain vandalism.  People destroy things belonging to others – no one benefits. Vandalism isn’t logical.                                            When I was going through puberty, I didn’t understand why the girls preferred the bad boys (who didn’t treat them with respect).  They rejected the good boys.  That is illogical unless somehow evolution created the preference (we’ve talked about this before).         SM – opinion has no weight in the process.  SM – unverified data is no data.  SM – the testing has to be repeatable.  SM – failure tells you something (trial and error).  SM – when statistics are utilized they have to be used carefully-very carefully-very, very carefully.         Your last sentence starts with IF.  I don’t think as long as people try to take advantage over the other side – IF is possible.  SM is about a fair, unbiassed process.  Fair is subjective.  All's fair in love and war.    I liked your blog.  Keep ‘em coming.  We need more like that.

Steve

Comment: 

Steve's comments abut my blog are a good example of "peer review," getting others' opinions, or  critiques.  I think it is one of the most valuable parts of the scientific method.

My wise cousin Steve is absolutely right. "The scientific method can't be used to evaluate an irrational process - except (he goes on to say) to show that it is irrational." 

That was my point. That the first step in the SM is to make observations. If your data, observations are false, "opinion has no weight," and "unverified data is no data," then you can't go any farther with the SM. Maybe I was too liberal in calling my evaluation of Trump's actions SM. What I should have said was that it's important to realize that if you start with false data, your conclusions are false as well. I don't know why Trump does stuff, or why girls seem to like "bad boys," but I can still say that Trump's deployment of troops and girls hooking up with bad boys are mistakes, because their conclusions are based on false assumptions. 

  Also, we should all try not to try to "take advantage over the other side" by not listening to their arguments. 

Robin

  

The Scientific Method

 

Political events have recently been downright nonsense: shutting down the government to avoid helping people pay for health care, or sending troops into Washington, DC or Chicago, Ill. where there’s no crisis, or firing experienced experts from important public positions. Almost every day I ask myself: “Why did they do that?” or “Who benefits from that?”  And then they do a poll, which shows that a good part of the population supports it. 

I guess Trump is behind it. Some say he wants to be a dictator. Others say he just wants to make money. Others say he’s courting support from the wealthy. None of that makes sense to me. Trump is old. Even if he became a dictator he wouldn’t have long to enjoy it. He already has a lot of money, and so do his wealthy supporters. As for the population, why do they support him even though his policies hurt them. None of this makes any sense to me, so I ask myself: “What would my wise cousin Steve say?” 

I think he would say: “Use the scientific method.” He’s fanatical about the benefits of the scientific method. It might not give you an answer to why Trump does this or that, or to why people support him, but it might give you a way of judging his policies, or actions. What is the scientific method, anyway? 

It’s a process that’s been developed by scientists over the last three or four centuries to evaluate ideas. It involves making careful observations, developing a hypothesis which explains the observations, testing your hypothesis by experiments, and then reporting your results. The process may require expertise. For example if the subject is technical, experts may have to study for years to obtain the background necessary to even understand a small area of science. Also the process needs input from other experts in the field or in related fields. Your observations may be wrong, or colored by your personal experience. Your hypothesis may have already been disproved in the past, so testing it again may not be necessary, and finally,  your experiment may be flawed in some way. 

What has that got to do with politics, you say? Well, take for example, sending Federal troops and National Guard to Washington, DC. You don’t need an expert to observe that there’s no serious problem with law and order in DC. There’s actually been a fall in crime over the last year. Local authorities say that police can handle crime and don’t need help from the federal government. 

That should be the end of the problem. Simple. Crime is down. There’s no need for Federal troops, but Trump is also sending troops into Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Ill., and Memphis, Tennessee. Let’s use the scientific method. Observation shows that there’s no big problem with law and order in any of these cities, but they are all led by Democratics. So it’s a politically motivated action, to solve a problem created by lies, to support Trump’s political agenda.  We don’t need to go any farther. 

So what good is the scientific method if we can’t trust our leaders? We’re not all experts on crime, or immigration, or economy, or health care. We don’t always know if we’re being lied to, and there’s also the technique of just reporting news that support your point of view. I think you can still trust the major media news, but for specific questions you can look at reports by both left and right leaning media. That’s what my wise cousin does. You can also look at AI sources. 

The scientific method also weighs the opinions of experts more than those of ordinary citizens. That makes sense because they know more about their field of interest.  In their book: “Good Economics for Hard Times,” Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo cite a survey of economists about whether the North American Free Trade Agreement improved the average person’s well being. 95% answered “yes.” When the same question was asked of representatives of the general public, only 45% responded “yes.” When you look at Trump appointees, they are not experts, or even people whose opinions reflect those of most experts in their field. You’ve got a TV host as Secretary of Defense, and a vaccine denier as Secretary of Health. What have they got in common? They’re both sycophants, yes men. The same can be said for almost all Trump appointees, and furthermore, Trump has fired the experts, experienced people already in government, or he has indiscriminately fired large groups of government workers, regardless of their experience or expertise. 

What can we do? The first thing is to become aware of the problem. Don’t just trust the opinions or even the ‘facts’ reported by people in power. Look at each issue from both sides, and look stuff up. As my wise cousin Steve says: “The more you learn, the more you can sympathize with others’ opinions.” If we can get past the first step in the scientific method, if we can trust our observations, then maybe we can go on to the other steps: making reasonable hypotheses, and testing them. Then and only then can we have reasonable discussions about what to do. If we’ve learned to trust each other, and can agree on what’s true and what’s false, then our discussions will be more respectful.   

 

The New America

 

Saddened Statue of Liberty

 

I haven’t written much lately. It’s not that I haven’t had opinions or feelings about recent events. It’s just so overwhelming. And there’s the feeling of helplessness. I can’t believe Trump will be in office for another 3 ½ years. Maybe things will cool down a little after the midterms if Congress returns control to the Democratics, but Trump doesn’t wait for Congress to act, he seems to have the Supreme Court on his side, and he does most things by executive order anyway. 

Just judging Trump’s actions according to my standard of doing what’s good for people, I can’t think of one single thing he’s done that benefits anyone, except maybe the extreme wealthy, who seem to be falling in line, except for Bill Gates, who said of Elon Musk, Trump’s head of DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency, “The richest person in the world is killing the world’s poorest children.” I kind of expected Warren Buffett to say something about Trump, but I haven’t seen anything. Maybe he’s afraid, like the Republican Congressmen. 

It's hard to decide what’s Trump’s worst action. Maybe it’s his dismantling of USAID, the agency that used to give food, medicine, and much more to poor starving people around the world. Ending that program will cause thousands of deaths. That certainly doesn’t do anybody any good. I think his justification for ending the program was to decrease government spending. 

Then there’s Trump’s immigration policy. He claims without evidence that other countries are sending criminals to the United States although the crime rate among immigrants is less than among native born Americans. There’s certainly criminal activity among immigrants, but he doesn’t seem to be targeting criminals. In fact, he’s rounding up “immigrants” where they work, or at court appearances where they are required to go to apply for visas or citizenship. The “officers” who arrest them are wearing masks and no proof of authority. Then they are placed in jail, often far from home, even in foreign countries like El Salvadore or Sudan. Families are separated. There’s no legal process. Legal aliens or even American citizens have been arrested. This certainly doesn’t help anyone. In fact it’s just cruel. 

So, how about foreign policy?  Trump has met with and befriended heads of authoritarian states like North Korea, Russia, China, Hungary. During his last term he said that he trusted Putin more than our CIA. On the other hand, he has criticized and alienated our traditional allies, Mexico, Canada, and NATO, accusing them of cheating us. He has continued assisting Israel in their war against the Palestinians, and withheld aid from Ukraine in their defense against Russia. Whatever you think about who’s right or wrong in these conflicts, Trump’s actions have led to more killing and starvation. He has justified his actions in several ways. Those that stand out to me are economic - he thinks our allies are letting us bear most of the burden of foreign aid and defense - and just plain admiration for dictators. 

Then there’s the idea of annexing Canada, Greenland, and Panama. Kind of sounds like Putin.  These are actions that would require military action, which would certainly increase death and suffering. For what? More security? It seems to me that it would make more enemies in our own hemisphere. 

What about the economy? I think that’s what got him elected. He’s supposed to be a successful businessman, even though he’s gone bankrupt three or four times -I forget which, and has cheated on his income tax, and not paid his workers. His answer for the USA is to cut taxes for billionaires, money they don’t need, thinking this will stimulate the economy - the trickle down theory, which has failed over and over again, even though the Republicans keep touting it; tariffs, which is actually a sales tax on Americans, thinking this will be a big source of revenue to replace losses from the tax cut, and will bring business back to the US. Of course, the reason businesses outsource to other countries is because it’s cheaper over there. So tariffs will make life harder for our middle and lower classes, and probably harder on foreign workers as well. 

Science is another category that Trump seems to oppose – I don’t know why. He’s cut funding for medical research, medical care, higher education, global warming. Even during his prior administration he moved the headquarters for the Department of Agriculture, leading to the resignations of many of its workers. His cuts to vaccination have already led to large increases in the number or measles cases from hundreds to thousands. Funding for research in cancer, infectious disease, medical transplantation has been cut. Enrollment in institutes of higher learning, as well as funding in general, has been cut, which will result in the loss not only of research, but the loss of many gifted students, many of whom stay after graduation. There’s no telling how many lives will be lost because of these inexplicable changes, for what? Saving money? 

For example, Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr., has decided to do safety studies on all new vaccines, and also to change the CDC recommendations for giving COVID and flu vaccines, without consulting CDC vaccine experts. In fact, most of the vaccine experts have quit, and six leading medical organizations have filed a lawsuit over the matter. 

Trump has announced that he’s getting rid of FEMA, and he’s already cut staffing for the National Weather Service, just as the death toll from the flooding in Texas has passed 100, possibly because there was no warning for residents to evacuate the area. 

Another broad category of Trump actions is DOGE, or Department of Government Efficiency. His henchman, Elon Musk, has been going from department to department, even to departments that are supposed to be independent, firing workers indiscriminately, and copying records. How does that make the government more efficient? He’s not looking for waste or inefficiency. He’s just firing people. Of course this actually creates inefficiency, leading to more plane crashes, less time for warning of natural disasters. I don’t know why he’s copying records. Is it to identify aliens, find justification for the firings? It’s illegal, of course, and there are umpteen lawsuits challenging his actions, but the damage is already done. People will move on, and your personal information is already out there. 

How do you estimate the damage DOGE has done? Government departments are there for a reason, and cutting staffing will make them unable to do their jobs. We’ll continue to have more plane crashes, more epidemics, more food poisoning, and the world will continue to get warmer. 

Trump has certainly made more money in office than any other president. He has brazenly sold everything from watches to trading cards. He held a dinner for million dollar donors, and has started a cryptocurrency firm. 

Trump has already gotten control of the Republican party. Because of our antiquated political system in which there is gerrymandering, and nomination of candidates by the party instead of the people, Trump can end the career of any Republican who opposes him. He has eliminated any criticism within his administration by appointing only staunch supporters who are totally unqualified for their positions. Because of his support by billionaires he is gradually getting control of information distribution, and may thereby win more independents over to his side. 

The legal system has been kind of a thorn in Trump’s side. Because of his conviction on 34 Felony counts, he should be in jail now, but because he was running for president, they put that on hold, thanks to the Supreme Court, which ruled that he can do pretty much anything he wants. 

One of the first things Trump did as president was to pardon all the January 6 rioters. He called them “heros.” Among his pardons was a gang leader serving six life sentences, and the son of a $1 million donor. He’s using the Justice Department to get revenge on his enemies. He got free legal help from several law firms by promising not to sue them for representing his enemies. Letting criminals out of jail is surely not making life better for the public. 

Possibly Trump’s most serious crime is against the legal system itself, ignoring the freedom of speech, birthright citizenship, forbidding of emoluments, and due process. 

Some future historian will probably estimate the number of lives lost because of Trumps actions. Life will certainly be worse for a long time. Maybe we won’t even emerge from his reign as a democracy.

 

 

 

 

 

Patriotism

 

As I drive around town I see flags everywhere. Flags on peoples’ houses, on their cars, flag pins on their shirts or coats. In this time of conflict and disagreement, everyone seems to agree on patriotism. In fact, if you show signs of disloyalty, you’re in trouble. Recently people were criticized for displaying the Mexican flag.

So what’s so great about America? Trump yammers about other countries stealing from us, but actually we have the highest standard of living in the world. Other countries have a right to complain about us stealing from them. We have the best health care in the world but It’s not available to most Americans. We killed a whole generation of Vietnamese, to save them from communism. We overthrew the government of Iraq, killing 150,000 Iraqis, because we thought they were using “weapons of mass destruction,” which turned out to be false, and the power vacuum we created led to a sectarian war which claimed 150,000 more lives.  We occupied Afghanistan for twenty years killing 60000 Afghans and overthrowing the Taliban because they refused to extradite Osama ben Laden, planner of the 9/11 terrorist attack. Then the Taliban took over again when we left. 

I could go on, and on. We have high levels of gun violence, prejudice, homelessness. We do have a democracy, although it’s been a little shaky of late. We hold ourselves out as being a haven for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Actually we have a history of banning immigration, especially now under President Trump, who thinks most immigrants are actually gangsters. 

I’m not saying that we’re not a great country. We are, and we should feel proud, actually fortunate to have been born here. But other countries have cultures, customs, languages, histories that they are proud of as well. I’m part Chickasaw Indian, an Indian tribe with it’s own language, and traditions, and history, that are unique. We used to have a nation, but European countries colonized our land and killed most of our people, through disease and war, until we have little left but memories. There were hundreds of Indian tribes here when we were ‘discovered’ by the white man, each with it’s own traditions and culture. Only a few have preserved the memory of their history. I’m still proud though, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time learning about my Chickasaw heritage, and my family. It gives me a sense of belonging, a pride in what my family and my tribe have gone through and accomplished over the years. 

There are many cultural groups, everywhere in the world, that have a culture to be proud of, and stories to hand down to their children, but that’s not the same thing as nationalism. In this country there are many groups other than Native Americans, the Chinese, the Irish, the Italians. All were discriminated against, even enslaved. All of them are expected to be ‘patriotic,’ even though their history gives them every right to resent the way they have been treated.

Patriotism is a thing of the present, not history or culture, race or family. It’s actually part of a strategy to keep people in line, to make people support the government. People in every country are expected to be patriotic, loyal to the country they live in. They’re expected to pay taxes, to serve in the military, to sing patriotic songs and to wave their flag. 

Everyone knows that people in every location, every race and culture, whether rich or poor, have the same potential. We’re lucky to have more opportunity to develop our potential, not because we deserve it, but just because we were born in a country that gives it to us. 

Years ago I picked up a book my wife was using in a course she took on international economics. It pointed out that poor countries usually exported raw materials and cheap labor. In return they had to pay high prices for manufactured goods. As a result, poor countries tend to get poorer and rich countries richer. That’s only one reason. There’s also war, and oppression, and education, natural resources, politics, etc. We should be working to raise the living standards of poor countries, to redistribute wealth, education, and resources to benefit everyone, to play the “world game.” (See post of May 20, 2025.) 

But we don’t. In fact our current president got elected by promising to deport poor immigrants. “Make America Great Again,” was his slogan, and since being elected, he’s done everything possible to isolate us and to protect our wealth, using patriotism as an excuse. Immigration is a good peaceful way to redistribute wealth, and it actually infuses society with hard working, ambitious people with new ideas. 

Patriotism is dangerous though. It gives rich countries an excuse to hang onto their wealth. It gives wealthy people an incentive to take control. It gave Hitler an excuse to tell people they were better because they were German. It is giving Putin an excuse to try and rebuild the Soviet (Russian) empire. And so on through history. 

I know we can’t just lie down and let other countries take over, but I think we should play the “world game,” encourage immigration, population control, social programs that help to redistribute wealth and resources.

 

 

 

 

The World Game

 

Geodesic Dome

A long time ago I read a book by an architect, Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome, a round structure made of polyhedrons that is surprisingly sturdy and can be made of light weight materials. Fuller was widely recognized for his innovations in architecture, but also for his social philosophy. He promoted the idea that science should be used to solve social problems. Among his supporters was Albert Einstein. In his book, Nine Chains to the Moon, the book I read, he observed that there was enough food, housing, and health care to support the world’s population, if we could just solve the problems of distribution, and political inequity. 

Since Nine Chains to the Moon was written in 1963, advances in science have improved standards of living, productivity, health care, and knowledge, but only for the fortunate. Tons of good food are thrown away or destroyed every year. There is plenty of empty space in buildings which could be used to house all the homeless. Medical science has developed understanding of most diseases, and cures or preventions for most. New technology has developed ways of producing nutritious food without slaughtering animals. The productivity of individual workers has increased by mechanization, and now by AI and robotics, so that all the necessities of life can be produced by only a small fraction of employable citizens. Ironically, this is considered a problem because it could cause underemployment. 

So what’s wrong with that? If each of us has to spend less time working, we could devote more time with our family and friends, and more time solving the problems of humanity, like worldwide inequity of resources, hunger, war, and climate change. 

How would we make a living? Why is it so important to earn a living? Wealth causes problems instead of solving them. People rob, cheat, amass fortunes to have more power and wealth than their neighbors. Fuller invented a game called the World Game in which players used their knowledge and creativity to solve the world’s problems. What if wealth, power, prejudice, inequality of rights, and privileges were identified as problems, and the resources of science and knowledge were applied to enable people to share and to help those in need? What if we all played Fuller’s game? 

You might say, “This is nonsense. You’re dreaming of a eutopia that can never exist.” But I could reply that ‘no one is trying.’ In spite of advances in science and technology, hardly anyone is trying to solve the world’s greatest problems. 

Solutions have been proposed and even put into place. In many countries support for the poor, the disabled, the elderly is provided by the state. In Finland, education is considered a right. In our last presidential election, one of the candidates proposed giving a monthly stipend to every citizen. My favorite country is Bhutan, where prosperity is measured by happiness. In the United States, one of the richest countries in the world, 14% of the population is “food insecure” – that’s what starvation is called nowadays, and we have the poorest health of any developed nation. 

As Buckminster Fuller observed over 60 years ago, we have the resources, even more now than then, to solve the world’s problems.

I propose that we identify as problems actions, customs, and systems that create inequity, suffering and death, and that we work to create solutions that make life better for everyone, not just the privileged few, both now and for future generations.

 

Life Is Precious - 2

 

Life Is Precious

A few days ago the Houthis shot a missile into Israel. Twelve were injured but no one was killed. It was the main news for that day. The next day the Israelis dropped bombs on Palestinians in Gaza, killing 40, and it was just a minor news item. The most recent Israeli – Arab war, mainly between Israel and Gaza, is one of the greatest tragedies of our time. The death toll in Gaza has risen to over 50,000 in the seven months since the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Over 30% of the Palestinian deaths have been children, compared to 1200 Israelis, 3% of which were children. The deaths on the Israeli side all occurred on October 7^th, the day of the terrorist attack, so the killing of Palestinians has been basically out of revenge. As it has been proven many times, the killing of Palestinians doesn’t reduce the risk of terrorism, it just inspires more. Now many of the deaths are occurring from starvation or lack of medical care as the bombing continues. What the war amounts to is genocide. Israel’s excuse is that the Gaza terrorist group, Hamas, still holds 100 or so Israeli hostages. 

The other night, as I was watching the “Boob tube,” I heard something literally made my jaw drop. A man was being interviewed about his new book – I forget the name – about the Gaza massacre. “They’re not like us” was one of the first things out of his mouth. Then he went on to claim that life means nothing to the Palestinians. I suppose he would include all the Moslems, Afghans, Iranians, Houthis. He went on about how the “Arabs” glorify death, considering it an honor to die for their cause. This is supposed to be an excuse for the genocide. 

General Westmoreland used almost the same words to describe the Vietnamese back in 1965, when he said, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient…life is not important.” This was his excuse for the strategy of “attrition,” the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and the destruction of rice fields to choke off the Vietnamese’ food supply. 

This same attitude, that the lives of an oppressed, disadvantaged people are worth less than ours,  or the Israelis, or whomever the oppressor happens to be, is a common excuse. It’s what the American settlers said about the Indians, what the Southern slave owners said about the African Americans under their control. It’s the excuse we gave for using the Chinese as virtual slave labor in the 1860’s, for persecuting the Irish in the 1850’s, and the Italians during the early 1900’s. It’s the same excuse the Dutch South Africans used to justify their apartheid system of subjugation of black South Africans. 

Are we really so different from the Palestinians? Don’t we glorify death when someone risks or gives their life for our country? We erect monuments and sing songs to commemorate them. We thank them for their service. This patriotic fervor isn’t so strong now because we haven’t really had an existential crisis in this country since World War II, and hardly anyone alive today remembers what that was like. But if we were attacked like the Ukrainians were three years ago, I think many of us would willing to risk our lives to defend our freedom and our way of life. It's human nature. Isn’t that what the Palestinians are doing? 

You would think that the Israelis would be more sympathetic. No ethnic group has been more oppressed throughout the ages than the Jews, but I suppose they are subject to the same psychology as other ethnic groups.

So the Jews oppress the Palestinians using the excuse that they are better than them, and life means nothing to them anyway. And the Palestinians respond with violence and terrorism. You could replace these groups with almost any others, at one time or another in history.  

So other cultures, other ethnic groups are like us, and we are like them. One side may be more educated, or technologically advanced, or more powerful economically or militarily, but we’re all equal. We all deserve freedom and opportunity. Life is precious. When a life is lost, no matter what the situation, it’s a tragedy. Their family and friends lose their love and support. Their potential for ideas, their leadership, their talents, their energy are lost.

The first criterion for governmental, and personal decisions should be does this save lives? Does it make life better for everyone involved? No matter how many books are written about why one group doesn’t value life, or why another group is culturally or genetically inferior. The answer is simple. All life is precious, and all people deserve respect. 

In recent times it seems that there are no world leaders, or even the majority of individuals, who understand this simple fact, or that’s what I was thinking when I started to write this post almost a month ago. Then Pope Francis died. Suddenly it occurred to me that the Pope is the one world leader who consistently, invariably considers the welfare and lives of the poor, the downtrodden, the disadvantaged, above all else. Jesus got it right 2000 years ago. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” His followers have gone astray many times over the years, but his teachings still survive. 

Of course there are others who advocate for equality, and charity for the poor and oppressed. There’s the Dalai Lama, and from what I understand, many Moslems, but I know of no other with the stature and respect as the Pope. So I’m rooting for Leo XIV. Maybe there’s hope for us yet.