Welcome to this final Third-Degree column: Over the years, Tough, Brief, Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private designed to force thinking and response with a bit of humor for seasoning now and again. This Sunday, we target: Denouement

  • TS Eliot concludes “The Hollow Men” with a world ending whimper versus a bang; is a better Third-Degree concluding choice to tie things up properly with an op-ed length denouement, capturing certain themes from the many Sundays and providing pathway?
  • Hardly playing possum, did Pogo warn us of enemies lurking in the shared mirror?
  • Are the enemies as plentiful as the stars, those who pontificate and those that shine and the burnt-out ones too?
  • Have Walt Kelly’s satirical Pogo cartoons faded but his 1970/71, Earth Day adapted, Commodore Perry words endure: “We have met the enemy and he is us”?
  • Has frenzy diminished from those first Earth Days so laden with multiple and dire “settled science” end of the world warnings of imminent famine and the coming ice age?
  • Does it take today’s post COVID revelations to put up warning signs about “settled science”, especially when it and its high priests achieve religious cult status?
  • Do paychecks, political power and reputations combine to make global warming and climate change God written gospel, hence, to many, unchallengeable?
  • To you?
  • When SecDef Austin affirmed Climate Change to be enemy number one echoing “existential” Biden, now resting up, sunbathing legacy, in the Caribbean, hopefully not plotting more outrage, what’s the takeaway?
  • Do we recoil as governments spend hundreds of Billions to chase green new deal ghosts with no effect and hear the clamor for Trillions more with the always effective UN leading the charge but asking good old USA (except when we back Israel) to pick up 1/3 of the total UN budget?
  • For cringe worthy fact checking, check out the new 94 nation UN framework group, aptly acronymic, FCCC?
  • Will people the world over continue the quest for affordable, available and secure energy in order to ensure economic progress, transportation ease and temperature control of personal environment?
  • Can common sense and market demand, that’s us, that’s pocketbook democracy, trump the profligate and the phony?
  • What else should we be demanding?
  • How about fixing, after sunk billions, the new American homeless record of 771,000 on the streets?
  • Should we emulate the California, greasy, Newsom record of failure and spend our way to the promised land?
  • Does national compassion allow for an immediate cash grant of say $200,000 per homeless person per year to house, feed, clothe, provide medical and mental support and otherwise care for the unfortunate (provide drugs and booze)?
  • That’s only 154 Billion a year which we can cut in half should we just send them all to Harvard and other progressive universities to provide diversity?
  • Downside is watch where you step in Harvard Yard…and that’s today?
  • How about ending racism by ending racism for money and political and pundit power but more for mutual, earned and deserved, personal dignity and respect?
  • Did Obama and Biden make racial matters better or worse?
  • Do DEI and ESG destroy E Pluribus Unum by exploiting manipulative language, fallacious guilt, combative intersectionality plus race and gender to pit us one against the other?
  • Worse, are we swept away by DEI/ESG tides of definitional obfuscation, idealistic ignorance or avoidance while our burdened, but still functioning, economy and cherished freedoms are the real targets?
  • Can mindless and endless friction and fiction crumble the nation or will mutual will of endless achievement win out again and again knowing of losses along the way?
  • If responsible, are we all, essentially, libertarian: “Leave me and my family alone?”
  • Is real choice indispensable to real freedom: Physical, Mental, Spiritual, Educational and Political?
  • Can the fiscal and monetary leviathan be tamed, and our future rescued from sure disaster?
  • Given the bloated size and inefficiency of government, can form and content be streamlined? How? Should speed of action and result be prized?
  • Can gerrymandering be a priority fix by mandating four straight sided Congressional districts and demanding voluntary, if not mandatory, term limits?
  • Is sanctity of the electoral process essential versus ease and error?
  • Can a new manifest destiny take hold at home, in North and South America, elsewhere?
  • If war comes to the doorstep, did we fail up the street?
  • Must we be masters of the high ground?
  • Is space a place for offensive and defensive capability including space to earth firepower? If we don’t and they do, then what?
  • Despite all the impediments, has America achieved much, fought hard, if not always wisely, to build the most advanced and envied civilization in history? Are we done with that? Hardly?
  • As we embark on a New Year of promise and problems facing the wind and going on alone, yet, perforce, together with toughened constitution (including irreverent humor) and The Constitution and the available blessings of this bountiful land for all our joined people, I offer, with no bangs, whimpers or embellishment, just a valedictory, Thank You to you, for you.

Ever onward, Keep Marching!

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living. “ The answers and actions are yours.