By Harry Holdorf, guest columnist
It being much easier to complain about things, rather than define a healthy society, I’ll describe some of our culture’s larger mistakes.
Here’s my top five.
1: Slavery
Most all cultures have enslaved sizable numbers of people, several on a grand scale; like the Romans, who constantly conquered and enslaved workers to build their magnificent structures. Down to us, who, in the U.S. Constitution counted our slaves as three-fifths of a human, for census purposes; and who built our capital and White House buildings with slave labor.
Today, about 70% of us are underpaid wage slaves, living paycheck to paycheck, paying outrageous medical bills and averaging 28% interest on our credit cards.
2: Nicotine inhalation
Millions of Allied Warriors began inhaling tobacco smoke during the Second World War 80 years ago, as a short-term, feel-good, fix.
One of our most successful social programs has been smoking cessation, through laws, taxes and social pressure. Those friends of mine who didn’t stop cigarette smoking are mostly dead.
3: Internal combustion engines
Our biggest environmental mistake, by far, is exploding fossil fuels, to get around and in power plants to provide electricity. Turning clean air into foul exhaust on a grand scale is our culture’s worst environmental activity, our greatest sin.
4: Over-population
Over-population has long been the scapegoat for much of the world’s problems. As the global population kept doubling, our atmosphere became that much dirtier and warmer.
However, with COVID-style pandemics, and rising levels of unhealthy chemicals, the global baby production rate is steadily dropping, along with male sperm levels; so population growth may contain self-correcting factors. If a nuclear war destroyed nine out of 10 of us, there’d still be 800 million humans left. Or if 99% of us vanish, there would still be 80 million folks left, making each of us a bit more valued.
5: Disappearing fractions
Eighty years ago, when adding machines came into use, followed by electronics of all sorts and then universal digitizing, high school math lost fractions, or “Love among the numbers.” Fractions create a relationship between the top and bottom numbers. Set two fractions equal to each other and you have a proportion.
One hundred years ago, prospective math teachers were asked if they could teach through the “Rule of Three.” (When you’ve got three of a proportion’s numbers, you can find the fourth number.) The difficulty was, too many high school math teacher/coaches couldn’t figure out where to put the three numbers; so as a culture, we stopped building proportions, and turned everything into decimals, the “math of the future.”
The writer is a resident of Blairsville, Ga.