Vietnam

          Vietnam turned the world up-side down for me, not to mention thousands of other veterans.  Suicides rates were high, wrestling with monsters like drugs, depression, wanting to walk out of society as I had until Vietnam known.  The seventies I found myself often alone in my canoe trying to make sense of the world that prior to then I thought, as did most I knew, made sense.   Not any more however --- I just could not fit the world Vietnam exposed to me into the small box that prior to Vietnam everything fit into so nicely. 

          I found myself on a mission --- to find the truth if even there was one.  What is life's purpose; if there was one?  What was it that made me feel like I should have been apart of that war?  Looking back at it in the seventies, I no longer felt that I should have been part of war?  So why was I?  What changed?  I want to know.

          So I enrolled in college hoping to find some answer to life's most perplexing questions.  And I believe I found them -- through education.  Not education as I knew it before Vietnam however.  Education prior to Vietnam I found to be more of indoctrination.  I was told what to think --- not how to think.  In fact, up until leaving the military and letting go of most ideals I had until then, I was often told "You are not paid to think.  You are paid to do or die."  But no more.  Ever bit of information passed before me was now subject to scrutiny.  Where is the evidence to support what I'm being told?  Who does this information benefit and what advantage might that information have on a person wanting me to know it?  I did not want people's opinions --- I want facts, verifiable, undeniable, observable facts.  And it took some time to find that --- but I did, in the field of science.  As such I ended up in the life sciences graduating twice from North Dakota State University. 

           Today I believe the world is at a crossroads.  The state of the earth is in peril do largely to the activities of man.  Not that mankind needs condemned for getting the human race into this dilemma, not to mention life on earth in general, for that suggests man had knowledge of how his actions were to effect future generations.  He usually did not.  How were backwoods pioneers to know that his axe was capable of deforesting the planet in just a matter of generations aided by new technology such as chain saws?  Then he saw only trees  ahead of him and they stretched on as far as his eye could see.

          Education --- I say --- not indoctrination.  Education. And that might require learning what we do not want to know or what others might prefer we did not know.  Today our education system is under attack by censors and propagandist with the expressed desire to hide well established facts from our children.   These censors and propagandists are attempting to rewrite history to shade our past mistakes from the view of critics.   We should be asking ourselves, is knowing the wrong history going to prevent the horrors of the past; for you know the old saying "He who does not know history is doomed to repeat it?   

          And science.  What of science?  Should our children have the right know what plastics are doing to our oceans?  Should they have to the right to know what carbon and sulfur are doing to our air?  Should they have the right to know the rate of species extinctions going on in their world even as I write?  Should they have the right to know what their prospects are for future energy sources are?  There are those out there who do not believe they should --- and are doing everything in their power to prevent them from knowing --- including censoring textbooks , creating schools, or home schooling where they can indoctrinate those children anyway they wish.   And before saying so what: remember; an uninformed vote counts as much as a well informed vote.  The difference is it is far easier to vote uninformed than informed --- it's just the consequences of voting uninformed are far worse for everyone.