Our Misplaced Priorities

 Just browsing the headlines today in the Washington Post:

Virginia Thomas urged White House chief to pursue unrelenting efforts to overturn the 2020 election, texts show

Race hovered over Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton goes after puberty blockers

Ted Cruz held up ‘The End of Policing’ in a hearing. Sales soared.

It’s Pride Week in Austin schools. The Texas AG says that’s illegal.

Then we find stuff that's buried on page A6 somewhere, or not even making much news.

The number one killer of adults ages 18-45 is fentanyl poisoning. COVID-19 is indeed a public health crisis that in my opinion we're not done with yet. But fentanyl is killing people, companies are making money by illegally distributing this killer, and we seem to be impotent against that threat. 

Public education continues to be under attack from the segregationists, this time in the guise of all manner of culture war issues like puberty blockers and critical race theory and Pride Week. Meanwhile, our kids keep falling behind in math and science and reading and writing while the politicians argue over masks and whether little Johnny should wear a dress. And those kids will not be able to compete in the 21st-century global economy, leading the world in the 21st-century global energy transition.

And speaking of the 21st-century global energy transition, Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has opened the eyes of the West to the perils of dependence on crude oil imported from bad actors like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, and others. The price of gasoline won't matter when most vehicles on the road have electric motors instead of internal combustion engines. The price of propane won't matter when you heat your home and your water with a very efficient electric heat pump. The price of fuel won't matter when your forklifts and your golf carts have batteries instead of fuel tanks. 

But instead of tackling hard issues head on, in good faith, we spend our political energy fighting over bullshit.

Ukraine

 It's time for the United States and NATO to step up against Putin's aggression. It appears that the Russian army is bogged down in its attempt to control Kiev. The real front is along Ukraine's coast, from Mariupol to Odesa. 

I suggest sailing the USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group from the Eastern Mediterranean through the Bosporus into the Black Sea, in a show of freedom of navigation. This would, in my opinion, provide a huge distraction to Russia's Black Sea fleet, in particular dissuading the Russians from conducting amphibious assault operations along the coast of Ukraine.

3/24/22 My friend Bill Everett posts this on his blog: The war in Ukraine is not only a struggle over autocracy versus democracy (and not simply over the value of national sovereignty). It is a struggle over the degree to which Christian churches will align themselves with nationalisms and imperial versions of “Christendom.”