Bob Letcher: If we agree simply to total up CO2 emissions, China ends up being the world’s biggest emitter. But, if we agree to account for China’s much larger population, by ranking per capita emission, the US can go back to its familiar cheer: “We’re #1! We’re #1! Whhoooa!!”

Bob Letcher: Unemployment compensation was conceived as a temporary solution to a temporary problem, getting people through the down part of one cycle to the up part of the next cycle; not as a long-term solution to a long-term structural problem.

Bob Letcher: Simply to “count medals” egregiously ignores the importance players on both sides of the “GOLD MEDAL” game ascribed to winning that game. And not without reason: the Government of Canada—Team Canada’s Government—had undertaken as a matter of national pride, if not national policy, its own “own the podium” program.

Bob Letcher: Remember the ad, “This is not your Father’s Oldsmobile.”—the one with Captain Kirk beaming into his daughter’s Oldsmobile? Well, these days, there isn’t anyone’s Oldsmobile anymore; not yours, not your Father’s, not Captain Kirk’s… it’s all just gone: the nameplate, the jobs, the factories, the towns—and the lights have been turned out. And that’s just at Oldsmobile.

Robert Letcher: Heck! Just talking about progressive social change is difficult. If I try to “tell it like it is”, it’s too complicated for many people to comprehend, and for some people who think that anything worth knowing should require no effort from them to understand it.

Robert Letcher: Conflicting interests aren’t the only obstacle, either. Ambiguities run through and through the whole matter. I myself benefit from technological breakthroughs that have elevated me from only a bit better than existing into really living. I tell people that I know how Lou Gehrig felt.

Robert Letcher: For decades until the recent economic “troubles”, middle classes readily bought into the elite-serving argument: if we don’t question the morality of—and possible connections between—extreme poverty and extreme wealth, elites will act to assure that most of us will never be as poor as those poor Haitians (best delivered with a Glenn Beck quiver).

Bob Letcher: Taxpayers have a right to expect more for their money, and during these difficult times, they desperately need more for their money. They have a right to expect their support of institutions of higher learning to provide higher learning.

I might add a third possibility: doing what one is called to do. That is to say: going beyond the narcissism inherent in indulging one’s passions, to accepting one’s destiny.

To me, that makes education crucial to this country’s future. What will be required to avoid losing? If people detect either that they are no longer being challenged by their work, or if they find themselves reading beer bottle labels under tables, then I would suspect that the country is on its way to History’s Great Dustbin.

This past June, heads of energy companies and heads of Ohio’s State Government came together to announce something that was, for me, both dreadfully unexpected and dreadfully dreadful, too: that they would undrertake to build a new nuclear power plant in Piketon, Ohio

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