The direct cause of the Q-Anon/Far Right assault on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday is not in dispute, at least not to anyone who can think and is in command of his or her faculties and who understands facts. That direct and proximate cause was Donald J. Trump, who planned a rally for that morning and who incited fanatical supporters to march on the Capitol and to disrupt the certification of the results of November’s Presidential election, a certification that is largely ceremonial, given that the states control the vote count and the electors.

That mass assault occurred and succeeded in overwhelming the Capitol Police Force for a very different reason. Trump and other extremist groups – largely but not exclusively right wing – have succeeded in effectively brain-washing 25%-35% of the American public because public education has largely failed the majority of students in U.S. schools. The result is that far too many people cannot or will not think and will accept whatever ideology they feel comfortable with… even if every fact behind it is incorrect or flat wrong.

Trump has filled his followers with four years of falsehoods and lies… and those in that mob swallowed them whole and without thinking… and attacked the Capitol.

The Capitol Police failed to prepare for the descent of the mob on the Capitol for much the same reason. They’ve been conditioned to think of BLM movements or even women equality protesters as “dangerous,” but not alt-right white supremacists – even though the FBI has been pointing out that the most dangerous extremists are white supremacists. In short, the leadership of the Capitol Police didn’t think or prepare, even though Trump made no secret of the rally.

And one of the reasons for these occurrences is, put bluntly, that the majority of students don’t know how to think, to analyze, or even to read effectively. They believe that knowing facts is irrelevant and that they can “Google” any fact they need to know… and this is true of college students as well. There are a number of factors behind this development, but one of the most important is the turn of education away from learning “facts.” Now, I’m the last person who would support mere memorization of facts as education – that’s a waste of brainpower and time – but there are certain core bases of knowledge that citizens need to absolutely “know” in their mind and hearts, and the same is true of all professionals in their field, whether that field is electrical work, plumbing, landscaping, law, medicine, engineering, or politics.

One of the reasons why two Boeing 737 Max aircraft crashed was Boeing’s failure to install multiple sensors for airspeed, but the other was the failure to understand that emergency procedures cannot just be put on paper. They have to be not only understood, but practiced – a lot. There weren’t just the two crashes that made the headlines. There were several other instances where sensor malfunctions caused the autopilot to override the pilot, but in those other instances, highly trained pilots knew what to do. One of the FAA requirements for the return of the 737 Max is more pilot training on those systems.

Right now, at least half of all Americans don’t understand the Constitution and how our government works [or is supposed to work]… but they think they do, and they’re absolutely convinced that their understanding is correct. Why? Because they never really learned the facts and the systems, largely because public education never really insisted on that. “It’s just history, and it’s old stuff that students don’t have to learn.” Most of the young women that my wife teaches honestly don’t know, for example, that U.S. women have only had the right to vote for a century… or that women still only make on average 60-80% [depending on the state] of what men do for the same position and hours worked. Many of those young women unfortunately, not only don’t know, but don’t care, even though statistics show that more than 60% of them will be the primary breadwinner at some point in their lives.

The mob that descended on the U.S. Capitol had literally no understanding of why there couldn’t have been vote fraud on the scale they were told and believed. They didn’t understand that elections are run on a state and local basis, and that roughly two-thirds of the states are currently controlled by Republicans, and at present, fairly conservative Republicans at that, and that Republicans aren’t about to allow Democrats to get away with voter fraud.

That mob also didn’t understand or care that Republican lawmakers who were contesting the validity of the Presidential vote weren’t contesting the validity of the election as far as their own re-election went, which, I submit, is a considerable failure in thinking things through.

No… those in the mob haven’t been forced to think, because our society no longer requires it, and there’s a growing culture that believes that whatever news and information appears that appeals to them must be correct… because it feels “right.”

True thinking and learning requires confronting the uncomfortable, testing one’s own beliefs against hard verified facts, and learning to discern what comfortable beliefs may in fact be wrong or not based in reality and what beliefs need modifying.

And U.S. education, for the most part, is failing in getting students to understand the importance of and the relation between facts and thinking… which was demonstrated by how many in that mob were comparatively young.

For some reason, the way too many people are acting during this pandemic reminds me of some of Yogi Berra’s sayings. Yogi Berra – the Hall of Fame catcher for the N.Y. Yankees and later a major league manager – NOT the cartoon character Yogi Bear (who appeared in 1958, more than a decade after Berra began his baseball career and whose name was suspiciously like Berra, although Hanna-Barbera claimed the similarity was “coincidental”).

The saying of the real Yogi that struck me when I heard the news this morning was: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” That’s because too many Americans are denying the deadliness of Covid-19 and are being stupid all over again. The highest amount of air travel in a year this past weekend? At a time when Los Angeles has issued a directive to ration oxygen to patients and for EMTs not to bring terminally ill patients to hospitals because there aren’t any beds.

Or as Yogi also said, “It ain’t over till it’s over.” Exactly! This pandemic isn’t going to be over until mask-wearing, social distancing, and vaccination are actually implemented by most Americans… and if they aren’t, we well might see a million deaths before it’s truly over, if it ever is.

Why is it so bad? As Yogi also said, “We made too many wrong mistakes.” Like having unrelated individuals to parties that shouldn’t have been held. Like going to church and compounding the mistake by not wearing a mask. Like holding crowded political rallies that never really mentioned Covid-19. Or saying that the virus would be gone by last April (when it won’t even be gone by this coming April).

But people don’t seem to listen or take in what’s going on around them. As Yogi also said, “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

One other thing he said that’s also applicable to the U.S. Covid-19 mess. “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” And, in that light, way too many Americans haven’t been careful at all.

Which is why, as the sage of baseball and life also said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

Trump’s latest actions, and the Congressional reaction, show, again, the need for greater responsibility, and reform, in Congress.

Trump went off to sulk and play golf, addressing the possible government shut-down and the Covid relief bill, at almost the last possible moment, after a great deal of rhetoric and no action for weeks, a lack of action that harmed a great number of Americans. Then there was his rash of pardons, largely not for people punished unjustly, but for individuals justly convicted, often of offenses committed in getting him elected in 2016, to which Congress offered no reaction.

Now… Congress in fact should have recognized that leaving matters not to just the last minutes, but effectively the last seconds, of this session has put both the Congress and the American people in an incredibly difficult position. A major part of the problem also lies with the American people, most of whom have willingly and often enthusiastically sorted themselves into separate tribes, each of which fervently believes that only it is correct and that the other tribe is knowingly pursuing an evil course.

Polarizations this violent have too often escalated into violence and bloody war, as in the cases of the American Civil War and the conflict between the followers of Martin Luther and those who backed the Catholic Church – a conflict that killed almost a third of the population of Germany over the course of a century or so. Both these conflicts, as well as others, resulted from the unyielding anger and polarization of beliefs on each side.

While sometimes there is indeed true evil in a belief, as in Nazism, the one thing I am certain of is that no group, religion, or political party represents unalloyed good. In the case of U.S. politics, I’ve been around long enough and involved enough in politics to have seen that neither party is that “good” or that “evil.” Both occasionally have good ideas, and both more often try to carry matters to extremes, sure of their own virtue, and neither recognizes that extremes and absolutes are never virtuous… and that their own extreme “virtues” can often be as bad as the other parties “evils.”

And, so far, neither one has been able to recognize that. That recognition is long overdue, and if it does not occur, matters will escalate into greater and greater social unrest and violence.

When Ben Bova died a few weeks ago, I got to thinking about my various interactions with Ben, as I suspect many of us do when we lose someone who made a difference in our lives. Ben was my editor for two different publications, one being ANALOG, but the other being Omni online, which, as I recall, only lasted as an online publication for a little over a year roughly in the 1995-97 time period, at least as I recall.

When Ben was editor of the online version, he reached out to me, not for stories, but for several columns dealing with future economics and politics. One was on the economics of interstellar trade. But I have no idea what I wrote because, right after the online Omni shut down, a victim of being established far too early when the market wasn’t ready for an online magazine, my writing computer fried itself. Now, I’d backed up all of my fiction, but not those columns. I’d gotten paid for them, but I didn’t even have a subscription to the publication, and, in fact, I actually have no idea whether all or any of the columns (two or three) were even published, only that I got paid. If I printed out those columns, the print copies have long since vanished or have been swallowed up in my back papers.

With a bit of diligence I did find the table of contents of all of the print copies of Omni, but nothing relating to the online version. This, I suspect, is going to be more and more of a problem in years to come. With paper copies, there’s at least a chance of tracking down something, but purely electronic data can be incredibly ephemeral, even when it’s theoretically “saved,” especially if there’s no documentation or no devices left to “read” that data.

On the one hand, I’d like to dig those old columns up, or at least the record of their existence, but on the other… do I really want to know what I spouted forth in economic terms some 25 years ago?

Last weekend, in the third quarter of a game where his team was losing 28-7, a fifth year senior quarterback [third string, because the second stringer was out with an injury] took over for the touted first-string quarterback of the University of Utah. The replacement quarterback, who had been a walk-on, several years earlier, had never taken a single snap in a game. It was his last college game, and in a calm and collected way, he turned the game around and led the Utes to thirty-eight unanswered points and victory. He didn’t make any truly sensational passes; he just ran a good team professionally and successfully, unlike the first string quarterback, who has completed an incredibly uneven year, combining miraculous throws with bonehead decisions.

Why didn’t anyone give the third-stringer a chance any earlier?

I don’t know, but I’d guess it’s because he doesn’t have a cannon for an arm, isn’t a sprinter, and he wasn’t “hyped” in high school. Mostly that he wasn’t hyped.

This problem isn’t limited to college football. It happens in many fields, where all the attention focuses on someone with charisma, or some flashy special skill, and others, who are far more capable, overall, tend to be overlooked.

Every week I read about new authors who are supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, or the next great genius of the written word, and yet, by next year, most have vanished or are slowly fading, to disappear several years hence when their third book cannot earn out, while other authors, ignored by the hypesters, produce works that continue to sell. I’ve also been in the field long enough to observe that almost none of the works of those hyped and vanished authors ever turn up as “forgotten masterpieces.” Yet, James Oliver Rigney, Jr., more popularly known as Robert Jordan, who created the Wheel of Time series [which has sold more than 14 million copies and redefined fantasy in the process] won no major awards in the field, except one, that one seven years after his death.

This is nothing new. Vincent Van Gogh sold exactly one painting in his lifetime, but today his works are worth millions, while the “big names” of that time, such as Ludwig Knaus or Eduardo Zabala, have faded from view and their works don’t even sell, or sell for a few hundred dollars. Very few people even knew of Franz Kafka until after he died, and Edgar Allan Poe never made enough money to support himself.

Then, and now, it’s often all about hype, but hype is overrated all too many times and seldom has staying power.