When sci-fi bumps into reality

I am currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future. The book is set in a hypothetical near future Earth dealing with severe climate change problems. The Ministry in the title is an international organization charged with implementing potential means of reducing the factors creating the dangerous climatic conditions. These include stabilizing ice melt in Antarctica, seeding the atmosphere with chemicals to reduce sunlight, and creating an international monetary system that rewards carbon sequestration. 

But the startling method (not at this point in the book used by The Ministry) is the violent targeting of both technology that uses fossil fuels and technology/carbon moguls. Drones bring down commercial aircraft and private jets burning fossil fuels. “Elites” are brought into re-education camps to be informed about climate change. And the worst fossil fuel advocates/profiteers are assassinated. 

Pro-environmentalists as assassins? The thought never occurred to me before reading this novel. But is this about to happen?

The murder of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson by an individual who was angered at insurance company policies and actions echoed Robinson’s speculation of unpopular/misguided/profit-over-good individuals being targets of social or political movements or philosophies. The shooting of Thompson was targeted and for a specific purpose it seems.

The Ministry for the Future is in the “hard” science fiction genre, much of the speculation it contains solidly based in current research and reality. And it opens the question “just how far should we go to reduce the existential threat of climate change?”

Reactions to the death of Thompson also make many of us ask “just how far should we go to reduce the health threats of the profit-based health care insurance system*?” 

Personally, I would never advocate any violent solution to any problem, no matter how serious. But perhaps having a loved one suffer or die or go homeless due to a denial of service by their insurance or cost of treatment does make one think.

Anyway, I do love it when science fiction predicts with some degree of accuracy. Or maybe I should just be frightened.

* Are there some systems that should never be profit-based, but only run for the common good? If so, I would put both health care and education at the top of that list. 

Are school librarians responsible for the re-election of Trump?

‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Oxford University Press, Dec 2, 2024 Oxford Dictionary 2024 Word of the Year

Librarians of my generation were trained to function in a world of print information sources - old fashion things like books, magazines, newspapers, and vertical files. A large part of our professional training involved learning how to select quality resources for our collections and how to weed out those which had become dated.

Our students (and teachers) had little need for information evaluation skills themselves when I started teaching in the 1970s. We librarians made sure they only had access to the good stuff. Maybe not a heck of a lot of it, but what we had in functioning libraries could be trusted.

Of course our students and staff (and ourselves) started getting access to the Internet (Internet was capitalized in those days) in the early 1980s and the horse was out of the barn when it came to information reliability. One of the earlier and more controversial websites was Wikipedia.  "Just anyone could write or edit an encyclopedia entry? The horrors!" A professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato designed a fake Mankato City webpage as a tool to teach people not to take Internet information at face value. (Mankato actually had tourists visit expecting to see its Great Pyramid.) Many of my articles and columns examined the need for increased information literacy. (See “Survival Skills for the Information Jungle,” Creative Classroom, Sept 2001 for example.)

Information professionals also warned early about something we called "ego-casting.” With a large selection of information sources, one could pick and choose only those in which one was interested or with which one agreed. It was an early view of what social media and cable news now makes so easy - and popular.

But such warnings went unheeded. Despite advocating for good information literacy skills, it seems that a large percentage of the US population still does not critically analyze the information they find online and gives credibility to only those sources to which they are politically aligned, leading many voters to choose candidates whose policies may not be in their economic or social best interests.

So, does the 2024 election prove that we as school libraries did not do our job - or not do it well enough? After 30 years of Internet access, have we still not gotten the message across to our students, to our teachers, to the public they need to be critical information consumers? If so, I feel great responsibility, having been considered a leader (or should I now say influencer) in the field for many years.

I can only hope the next generation of librarians is more effective than we were.

If God hadn’t wanted us to eat animals...

My dad and his younger brother

My dad died December 22, 1996 at the ripe old age of 65. I think about him now and then when one of his old sayings somehow pops out of my mouth. I doubt many of these were original with him, but they are what I remember him saying:

• If God hadn’t wanted us to eat animals He wouldn’t have made them out of meat.
• God only gives you so many heartbeats. Why waste them exercising?
• If you’re not ten minutes early, you’re late.
• Don’t ride the clutch.
• It all winds up in the same place anyway. (When the melted jello would mix with the mashed potatoes on his plate.)
• Call me whatever name you want, just don’t call me late for supper.
• Smells like money. (Whenever there was the smell of manure in the air.)

Anything your parents said that you now repeat?

See also Voices from the Past, Blue Skunk 6/4/09