We finally got the first snow of the year here in Cedar City. Only once since the town was founded more than 160 years ago has the first snowfall been later [January 8, 1977, in case anyone really wants to know]. This first snowfall wasn’t a dusting, but a respectable 8-10 inches at our house, which usually gets a few inches more than the town because we’re on a hill overlooking the main part of town.

But what amazed me most about this snowfall was the news coverage. On the front page of the local paper [one that has won numerous journalistic awards, I might add] on Wednesday,the morning before the snowfall, was a story predicting that the snow would arrive on Wednesday night, drop six to eight inches, and trail off by mid-day on Thursday. That’s very close to what happened.

HOWEVER, the local detailed forecast in the back section predicted snow flurries and no accumulation, and to top it off, the Thursday paper predicted no snow, except flurries late on Thursday. And we got another two inches of snow Thursday morning, and by mid-afternoon on Thursday, the sky was clear and cold, with no afternoon flurries.

I bring this up because it illustrates to my mind the growing tendency of younger people to compartmentalize their thoughts. No one at the newspaper, which has a comparatively young staff, even thought to compare their lead story to their forecast.

This is not exactly a new problem. I’ve noted for the past year, if not longer, that the forecast for Cedar City that appears in the Salt Lake Tribune, a newspaper published 250 miles away, is consistently far more accurate than the forecast in the Spectrum, which is published 50 miles away and which has a local bureau here.

So… what gives? It could be that the Spectrum subscribes to a cheaper canned forecast service. It could be that the staff doesn’t even read the forecast and considers it just another necessary canned feature that the newspaper has to have.

But to me, it shows that the editors aren’t really reading their entire newspaper… and that those numerous journalistic awards are suspect. Either that… or I really don’t want to read the papers that don’t get awards.

Anyway… it looks like, barring an unforecast heat spell, that we will get a white Christmas, after a long dry, cool, and brown autumn.

Several weeks ago, my wife ordered a replacement chair. She received an order confirmation, but days went by… without any chair or any more information. She called the company, and was referred to another number, where she was told they had no information, and that the order number was incorrect. She persisted, and after more than a half-hour the company finally located the chair and provided shipping and arrival information, but the only words remotely related to responsibility were, “The order number was incorrectly entered.”

There was nothing said about someone making a mistake.

And last year, The Atlantic actually ran an article on the phrase “mistakes were made.” Some of those using that phrase included Richard Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler, on the lies he had told the Washington Post [1973]; Vice President George H.W. Bush on the Iran-Contra scandal and the administration’s lying about it [1986]; Ronald Reagan, on the same topic in his State of the Union address [1987]; Bill Clinton on administration officials discussing banking policy in front of fund-raisers [1997]; Henry Kissinger, on human-rights complaints about U.S. intelligence activities in South America [2002]; New Jersey governor Chris Christie on the GW Bridge scandal in his State of the State address[2014], and, incidentally, Albert Speer at the Nuremberg trials [1946].

What bothers me about such phrases is that, all too often, they’re an attempt to avoid personal responsibility or to blame someone else, either for doing something wrong, or for not fulfilling the speaker or commenter’s personal desires, all under the guise of seemingly impersonal objectivity.

And, as the examples above demonstrate, the desire to avoid admitting blame publicly certainly isn’t a recent phenomenon.

Action in science fiction and fantasy is often overvalued, whereas, in mainstream fiction, from what I’ve seen, it tends to be undervalued. Part of this difference, I suspect, lies in expectations. Historically, science fiction and fantasy were expected to be exciting, and most readers tend to view action as exciting, while “mainstream fiction” is supposed to be “thoughtful.”

What this view tends to overlook is the fact that action, in real life, is always either the result of an earlier decision or a reaction to some other event or action. In short, somewhere along the line, someone’s “thought” was behind all that action.

Wars don’t start when one kingdom sends knights or troops across the border of another kingdom. They begin well before that for any number of reasons, when a prince is killed by a terrorist, or when a group of dissident aristocrats protest taxes imposed by a distant ruler, or when the head of state of one country decides to take back territory taken in a previous war, which had begun because that territory had been taken away even earlier. Or perhaps the war began when the ruler of a land decided to repudiate the authority of a high priest. Or when the ruler of one land seizes the ships of another land and demands tribute. From the decisions made in studies, throne rooms, military headquarters, or mercantile banks come actions that spur conflicts of interest, and those conflicts lead to wars or military actions and adventures of various sorts.

All too often in action-oriented books, there’s little or no mention of what led to the fighting, except for a brief mention or rationale, with most of the emphasis on what those involved must do in the situations in which they find themselves, and in a way, that makes matters so much simpler. Whatever the protagonist does is for his or her survival. The tacit assumption in most books, except those where the protagonist is an anti-hero, is that the main character’s goals are worthwhile, even in those instances where he or she may not be, although, sometimes, the story is about how the noble protagonist must stoop to despicable means in order to survive or to accomplish great and worthwhile goals [and, yes, I’ve written a few books with that plotline, but I’d like to think that there was a great deal more about why he or she happened to be in that position].

All that leads to the question: Does it matter what led to the fighting or the action?

Obviously, I think it does, as well as the question of how that thought or decision led to what follows. Almost always, military and “action” figures in real life reflect some aspect of their society… and the way that society, or that part of it, thinks. That means that a character that is true to life is going to give some thought to why he or she acts in the way they do, and they may feel conflicts with their mission or their orders… or with the laws under which they live. Or they may agree totally and yet find their orders in conflict with what they believe they stand for.

In most F&SF, this conflict and others are usually resolved in terms of action, although, personally, I try never to have all conflicts fully resolved, even when the ending theoretically ties up most of the loose ends. In mainstream fiction, it’s often never resolved, even when action does occur, but then F&SF has “traditionally” been more optimistic, an optimism that’s often come under attack by the “darker” side of the field as being unrealistic, but doesn’t that make “dark” F&SF more like mainstream fiction with magic or high tech?

One of the greatest gifts of the species homo sapiens is the ability to dream of what might be. Unfortunately, that ability is also one of our greatest curses, because it allows individuals to dream up unworkable and truly terrible beliefs and inspires them to try to impose them upon others, often by force or deception, if not both. In this, mass media, like all technology, allows the amplification of human abilities to spread and impose various beliefs.

So now we live in a country where the President of the United States believes that a tax bill that conveys the majority of its benefits upon the wealthiest one percent of all Americans will improve life for everyone and where a significant percentage of Americans shares that belief. A country where the President and policy makers believe that there’s a workable military solution to the nuclear weapons efforts of North Korea [and there is, that is, if you’re willing to accept the destruction of South Korea and millions of Korean deaths]. A country where roughly half the population believes that the massive proliferation of individual weapons of death actually reduces violence, despite endless and irrefutable [factually, that is] statistics to the contrary.

These sorts of delusions, of course, aren’t limited to the United States, and some other countries are far worse, but even here in the “good ole USA,” I run across personal examples that stagger me, even as I recognize that belief is stronger than fact, stronger than rationality, and more powerful than a speeding locomotive [to totally scramble metaphorical comparisons].

This week, a student we know revealed that she was told not to come for Christmas by her mother because she had set a horrible example for her younger siblings. Her offense? She was dating a young man who was not of her faith. Rejecting your own child for that?

Then I heard the university president claim that over the past twenty years the university had more than doubled in size, but the student/faculty ratio was lower. When the full-time faculty has increased by only thirty percent, but the administration and adjunct faculty have more than tripled, is this self-delusion or deliberate deception?

Here in Utah, President Trump proclaimed that his action to cut the Bears Ears National Monument by more than eighty-five percent would allow native people to have a rightful voice over the “sacred land where they practice their most important ancestral and religious traditions.” Those Native Americans clearly didn’t think much of that, since they supported the original monument size and in fact have so far filed four lawsuits against the Administration. The president also contends that the best Senate candidate for the open seat in Alabama is a confirmed sexual predator of high school girls because the Senate needs that Republican vote, while, of course, Al Franken and John Conyers – both Democrats – should be expelled from Congress for their sexual predation.

A national poll and study revealed that Americans continue to value men on their accomplishments and women upon their appearance. And, as I’ve mentioned so many times before, educational bureaucrats and politicians keep claiming education is getting better, and that more students are going to college and graduating. That may be so, but a greater and greater percentage of them can’t learn and synthesize information or write coherent paragraphs.

All this gives me the uneasy feeling that the “true believers,” those who place belief in their political tribe or faith above facts and reality, are winning and that the United States is indeed moving toward becoming even more of a La-La Land, where all that matters is the strength of belief, whatever that belief may be.

A few days ago, a friend of mine, who was also the husband of a colleague of my wife the professor, became a statistic. He shot himself fatally while his wife, also a professor of music, was at work. We’ve been friends, if not the closest of friends, for a number of years, and we even had them over for Thanksgiving dinner, as we have had for the past several years.

He had been an on-site construction manager for industrial projects, and some thirty years ago was badly injured in a construction accident. He was almost completely paralyzed for some time, but managed to regain enough muscular control that he could walk, talk, and handle most everyday tasks, although he did lose what I’d estimate as probably 60-70% of his former muscular strength, especially in his upper body. He lived most of his life since the accident in some degree of pain. With the help of opioids, he’d managed a normal life as essentially a house-husband – he did the cooking and light cleaning. And this worked for more than 25 years. But several years ago, even though he’d never abused opioids, with all the furor over them, he was essentially denied their use. Then he fell getting out of bed and shattered his leg, and had to go into total rehabilitative care because he didn’t have the upper body strength or coordination to use either crutches or a walker. Even after the leg healed, the pain got worse, and he lost 60 pounds in a year, and the doctors kept insisting the pain was all in his head.

He tried more physical therapy, to the degree that it was physically possible, and forced himself to take walks three to four times a day. Nothing that the medical profession suggested worked, and to top it all off, at one point, doctors even implied that both my friend and his wife were opioid users, which was totally ludicrous, given that she abstained from any kind of stimulants or drugs, except coffee, tea, and diet cokes… and that he had never turned to illegal drugs or to illegal means of acquiring prescription painkillers.

In the end, when he finally took his own life because the pain overwhelmed him, he became, not a victim of opioids, but of the war on opioids. He was an intelligent and highly disciplined man, a devoted vegetarian, who’d never used any drugs, except the opioid painkillers, and those never to excess, and who might have two glasses of wine with dinner, very occasionally. He was gently and kindly witty and very good company. He’d managed very well for 25 years on a moderate opioid regime, but with all the furor about opioids, this relief was denied to him.

This is not the only story I’ve heard along these lines, but it’s the closest one that I’ve witnessed personally.

As I’ve noted before, it seems as though the policymakers in this country, and possibly elsewhere, are ignoring the problem of pain and are essentially treating everyone who seeks relief of that pain as a potential criminal statistic. If this continues, and I see no sign of it changing, there will be a significant increase in both suicides and/or the use of illegal drugs or “illegal” possession of legal opioid painkillers, if not all three. And that’s assuming that these increases haven’t already begun.