Welcome to this Sunday’s  Third Degree:  Weekly  Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. Today we target:  The Fog

  • When it’s thick as pea soup, zero zero  (no visibility, no ceiling), in the air, on the sea, walking alone in the fog, are senses acute, sharp, apprehensive, if not fearful?
  • Does Sandburg’s fog creeping in on cat’s feet just a cute Chicago weather poem, portray human nature at work or portend  a stealthy process of obfuscation designed to conceal and afflict?
  • Is it the nature of governmental man to create fog, to obscure though complexity, quantity and process?
  • Questing for power or position, do politicians, aided or hindered by media mendacity,  generate maximum fog while claiming clarity and thinking only next election versus next generations?
  • Employing the fog of manipulative language, do pea soup policy and politics elevate and celebrate lying as an approved, and worse, by us, an expected, art?
  • Is this by intent or inattention? Who is accountable?
  • Who or what can provide direction and deliverance and get us through the soup ?
  • Is there a  beacon shining through, the sounding of a horn?
  • Who carries the light?  Who sounds alarm urging us to avoid the shoals?
  • Is that the question this foggy year of leaping and longing or any year?
  • Can we respond with scientific precision and experiment based on observation recalling:  “Experiments that need statistics really require better experiments?” (Rutherford)
  • Should we beware social sciences that  boil down to: “Some do and some don’t?” (Rutherford again)
  • For that matter, does any modifier of science create justified doubt?
  • Should we be leery of those with answers and seek out those with questions?  (Einstein)
  • Are we aware that “authority is not a source of truth nor is a belief or an opinion?” (Thank you Aristotle and Einstein)
  • Is a way out of the fog merely the individual pursuit of happiness in a free society(guard it well) and  characterized by:  “Something to do, someone to love and something to hope for?”  (Kant)

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