April 1, 2020

Good Morning,

It is a beautiful morning here in Kansas City. The sunshine is so welcome here; it was absent for so many days. Today used to be called “April Fool’s Day…” called such because someone would come to you can state that something had happened or some other semi-believable idea, and let you stew on it a while, then shout “April Fools!!!”

When I was a kid in El Paso, Tx, I attended a Christian School when I was starting 5^th grade. Mom had to take us to our church on Cielo Vista Avenue, and then we hopped a bus that would take us all the way out to Northwest El Paso to our school, which was a large building that sat on the church grounds, just 20-30 feet from the main church building.

On this day…some 43 years ago; my friends and I departed the doors of the bus playing “April Fools” jokes on one another. The pastor’s wife (a prominent Christian educator and wife of the Associate Pastor) quickly ordered silence among all of us and told us to move quickly into the building and seat ourselves. She then proceeded to give a sermon on the mount about “April Fools” being a tool of Satan, a venomous lie that corrupts children, and a pathway to drugs, sex, and rock and roll.

This was my very first example of how blatant ignorance led some poor soul down the long highway of religious hypocrisy and fanaticism. This school (and hundreds like it) had an intent of eradicating all secular thought from a child’s mind, “leaving only room for Christ.” I always likened that ideology to training a child to use the potty, but not teaching him/her how to wipe their behind. The child will learn to defecate in the potty but won’t ever bother to finish the job. In comparison, the child that is only taught verses and concepts out of the bible, and is never allowed to study the works of Galileo, Plato, and Socrates…will grow up to become an ignorant adult that perpetuates ignorance on his children.

Here in the USA, ignorance is a problem, and not a small one. Ignorant people spread ignorance like they are handing out candy. I hear people in Walmart telling their kids things that kids should never hear, and I see adult cahiers in checkout lines that can’t perform the most basic arithmetic.

Our country will pay dearly for that in the next twenty years. Kids today earn bachelors and master’s degrees and start their adult lives at least $27,000. If they attend a private school, you can almost double that. Our government (in its arrogance and ignorance) should have facilitated this long ago with better systems for college kids to mitigate debt.

Today, with Corona virus threatening the world’s population, many people choose to live in ignorance, and many choose to follow leaders that are ignorant. Our leaders are counseled by physicians with many years of experience, yet our leaders (namely the President of the United States) ignores or disregards this counsel until the last minute, and then it is too late. During this time of arrogance, people die. Most of us don’t bat an eye until the point where that is one of our children, our parents, or our close friends. At that point, all the bullshit it over, and ignorance has triumphed once more. I think back to that lady at the school telling us about the evil of April Fool’s day, and how it was “the Devil’s Tool.”

In my reckoning, “the Devil” is something that resides in all of us, and he is the master of negativity and ignorance. These days, I think “the Devil” is winning the race.

-Jim