A Last Word to the Young

[NOTE TO READERS: I'm traveling in Europe and am trying to get an iPhone and an iPad to do a computer's job. The experiment is not going well; hence you will find a dumbed-down format for this post. The normal format will return when I do, around the middle of November. In the meantime, you can find the usual links to most recent and recent posts in my last post under "Recent Posts" in the sidebar.]

This is a last-minute, pre-election post for young registered voters only. If you are 35 or under, are registered to vote, and haven't voted yet, don't even think about not voting today. Here's why.

Education
Energy
War and peace
Hate

Education. Today's college or university is the equivalent of high school for your parents or grandparents. You need a college education to understand modern life and politics, to get a good job, and to avoid being duped by all the political and social propaganda that comes from foreign intelligence services and our own demagogues .

If you're in college or have already graduated, you know how much a college education costs. You know because you have to pay for it yourself, with big loans that you have to repay yourself. Repaying those loans will delay or prevent you from buying a home, marrying, starting a family, and generally enjoying the American Dream.

It wasn't always this way. I got a college degree from the University of California and a doctorate in physics from its San Diego (La Jolla) campus---two of the best public universities in the world. When I finished, I had no debt and money in the bank.

Yes, I had help from scholarships and fellowships, and I also worked part time from my sophomore year on. But it was easy to stay debt free becoause our society then invested in its youth. My total "tuition" at the University of California, for example, was an "incidental fee" of $100 per semester. Taxes paid by the good people of California covered the rest.

How to pay to educate our youth is a choice that we all make together. For my generation, our parents paid the freight because they thought education important, and not just a tool to get a good job. For you, society has made a different choice, one for which you will be paying for years or decades to come. If you want to change that choice for your siblings and your children and grandchildren, you have to vote.

Energy. You've all heard about global warming. Many of you have felt it personally, in heat waves, droughts, or freak storms like Sandy, Harvey, Maria and Michael. Our president has said that it's all a hoax or (more recently) that we can't do much about it. So, he wants us to drill, baby, drill and burn, baby, burn as if there were no science and no tomorrow.

But whatever you may think about global warming, one thing should be clear. We are running out of oil and gas. According to my own original calculations, we will most likely run out of oil between 18 and 43 years from 2013 and run out of natural gas about three generations from now, depending on how we use it and how much we sell. You, your kids, or most definitely your grandkids will feel the pain.

When that happens, we will have to find some other ways to move our cars, trucks and planes, to continue mechanized farming, and to heat our homes in cold climates (which will still exist, just further north). Here in the German state of Bavaria, where I am right now, they are doing just that. Many rural homes have solar hot-water heaters, solar photovoltaic arrays, or both. There are megawatt-level windmills visible on many hills, and megawatt-level ground-based solar arrays every few kilometers along the autobahnen.

Germany, it seems, is taking seriously the challenge of converting its homes, farming, industry and transportation to sustainable energy. Outside of a few leading states like California and Texas, we Americans are not. We have no national plan. Instead, we are leaving everything to so-called "private markets," that is, to the whim of investors who see a way to make a quick buck.

If you want to gamble on that sort of random, non-solution for yourself, your kids, and your grandkids, you needn't do anything. If you want a plan for the energy to keep our nation running as fossil fuels run out, you'd better vote.

War and peace. Since the Korean War, in which our fighting ended in 1954, we Americans have fought three unnecessary wars, in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Every one of them is now longer than the longest war we fought before Korea (our own War of Independence, six years). We are still fighting the last two.

You're not likely to be drafted to fight in these optional wars. The youth protests against the draft during the Vietnam War saw to that. But our pols drew the wrong lesson from Vietnam. Instead of reasoning that wars with weak popular support are a bad idea, they sought to grab the power to make wars with soldiers who cannot complain---our so-called "all voluntary army."

Unnecessary wars are immoral. They kill good people for no reason. They waste our national resources and keep us from fixing things that need fixing at home, such as our outmoded and dilapidated infrastructure. And, not surprisingly, they make our allies leery of working with us and our rivals and enemies more interested in attacking us. They change our image abroad from one of hope and help to one of arrogance, bullying and devastation. When we support "allies" like Saudi Arabia in bombing schools and hospitals and killing civilians in places like Yemen, we begin to look like Russia in Syria.

Congress is supposed to put a brake on unnecessary wars. But since Vietnam it has virtually abandoned its constitutional role in making war. If you want to keep this president (or any other) from making war on a whim like a Roman emperor, you'd better vote for like-minded members of Congress.

Hate. When President Lyndon Johnson rammed the civil rights and voting rights acts through Congress in the mid-1960s, he said his party had probably lost the South for two generations. It has been close to three generations, and we still don't have a truly color-blind society. Instead, we have a president who berates and tars Democrats for wanting to give racial and ethnic minorities a fair shake.

Not everyone is like you young folk. A lot of people my age or even younger let prejudice and bigotry color their judgment. Some can even imagine a so-called "caravan" of seven thousand miserable refugees from Central America, mostly women and children, becoming a serious threat to our domestic tranquility.

But you are smarter and better than that. You know that it's wrong to prejudge those miserable refugees without vetting them and giving them a chance to speak for themselves. You know that, even if we admitted every last one of them (which we will never do) they could disappear in our nation of 320 million without a trace. Even if they all settled in a single city of over one million population, they wouldn't amount to much more than rounding error.

If you want to give those miserable refugees a fair shake, if you want to push bigotry closer to the vanishing point, you're going to have to vote.

You're going to have to vote especially if you come from a racial, ethnic, or sexual minority yourself. You can, and you should, vote for qualified minority candidates whenever possible. You should do so in order to bring us all closer to Dr. King's Dream and the credo in our Declaration of a Independence, that "all men are created equal."

And you ought to do so even if you have to wait, fill out paperwork, or stand in long lines, in order that those who follow you don't have to. That would be no more than those who came before us already have done for you and me.