Science!

The Barbie You Can Be Anything Science Teacher comes with accessories including a globe, laptop, books, clipboard, beakers, safety glasses, and a microscope. Why a globe? Maybe she’s teaching students the science of tracking pandemics. The science of climate change. The areas of the world where science is the best effort humans can make to eradicate poverty, disease, and hunger.

Yesterday, I read the comment of a doctor who suggested to a patient that his symptoms warranted a Covid test. The patient pulled off his mask and coughed on her. She said she had over $98,000 invested in her education and career, and she is finished. I can’t blame her. When your patients are willing to take horse dewormer and other unproven “cures” and “treatments,” inject, inhale, drink, and lather on Clorox and other harmful substances, and drink their own urine–or camel urine–to prove they’ve “done my own research” and “will not be forced” to take a vaccination that is demonstrably saving lives even for those who get a breakthrough case of a virus… Well, they’d rather spread one lie after another, take their chances on breathing their last breaths in pain hooked up to medical equipment developed by the science and medicine they don’t trust, leave behind their children and grandchildren and parents and sisters and brothers and the hobbies they love and the jobs they do well and their churches than believe that science can save them, and they are indifferent to infecting anyone else, including the people trying to keep them from getting sick or losing their lives.

No science in the world can cure willful ignorance. But that science can still inspire research and solutions and students and explorers who want to effect a positive difference in the world–to me, that seems infinitely greater and nobler than blind faith in the architects of lies and the charlatans touting false fixes.