Responding to Sagan - The Monday Morning Memo

“You know, as a 41 year old, I feel like life has bullied me so much, that I keep my head down, read my sci-fi books, and buy something cool off of Amazon every now and then. I genuinely feel like nothing short of major economic, revolutionary, or global war will change things much. So instead, I stay informed, I vote, but I know we’re collectively eyeing our foot with a shotgun. As an idealist who loved history and civics when I was young, I truly bought into everything our founding fathers established (almost everything, I’m black). But when you get older, work, have a mortgage, you become disillusioned with seeing how everyone in power games the system. To the point, that well meaning people are conditioned to play the game when they first get power. Democratic or Republican, we should be a stronger republic with more quality, fact driven non-biased news, strong STEM and civics for students in order to raise quality citizens who work together. Anyways, I’m rambling, so I’ll put my head back down.”

– apok1980, commenting 2 months ago about what Carl Sagan wrote 26 years ago.

NOTE FROM INDY:
I didn’t know what STEM was, so I asked the Goog. She said it stands for Science Technology Engineering Math.

“The other danger of rich people was their dogs. Poor people in my experience have mean dogs and know it. Rich people have mean dogs and refuse to believe it. There were thousands of dogs in those days, too, inhabiting every property – big dogs, grumpy dogs, stupid dogs, tiny nippy irritating little dogs that you positively ached to turn into a kind of living hacky-sack, dogs that wanted to smell you, dogs that wanted to sit on you, dogs that barked at everything that moved.

And then there was Dewey. Dewey was a black labrador, owned by a family on Terrace Drive called the Haldemans. Dewey was about the size of a black bear and hated me. With any other human being he was just a big slobbery bundle of softness. But Dewey wanted me dead for reasons he declined to make clear and I don’t believe actually knew himself…

It took me ages to creep, breath held, up the Haldemans’ front walk and up the five wide, wooden, creak-ready steps of their front porch and very, very gently set the paper down on the mat, knowing that at the moment of contact I would hear from some place close by but unseen a low, dark, threatening growl that would continue until I had withdrawn with respectful backward bows. Occasionally – just often enough to leave me permanently scarred and unnerved – Dewey would lunge, barking viciously, and I had to fly across the yard whimpering, hands held protectively over my butt, leap on my bike and pedal wildly away, crashing into fire hydrants and lamp posts and generally sustaining far worse injuries than if I had just let Dewey hold me down and gnaw on me a bit.”

- Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid