Late Night, Can't Sleep, Ruminations

“It’s never the doctors or the scientists; it’s always the barbarians at the gate.”

There are two kinds of people. One group is young and they know in their core that the world should be made into a perfect place, and they are angry as they view the reality of the world and thus observe that it IS far from a perfect place.

The other group is old, and they’ve been watching the world for a long time, and they’ve noticed that it is far from a perfect place, but they have concluded that the world will NEVER be a perfect place.

This notion is as good as it gets if you’re looking to explain the half filled glass and how it is perceived. One group is optimistic but frustrated. The other group is frustrated and figures the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

I am no longer optimistic. I’ve been young, and now I’m the other. So this clouds my thinking in a predictable manner, so bear with me.

I have some holes in my education. Setting out to become a veterinarian exposes the student to plenty of science and related disciplines. But in the rush to master these areas, some of the philosophy, economics, language, education, history, literature, etc. get left behind. Folks often slap me upside the head when I express an opinion derived from my observations rather than any actual study of these important fields. I’m not truly qualified to talk of the human condition. I’m a reasonably deductive person but that is no substitute for actual expertise in any of these fields. Try to remember these last two sentences because hopefully I’m going somewhere with this thought, but this is opinion, not science.

One of my deductions regards my impressions of education in this country’s population. Taken in its simplest form, education should expose students to a certain minimum amount of plain old information, which forms a foundation for more learning and allows the student to rise to two legged transport. And then from this platform, a student can branch out into specific areas with more specialized learning to master.

This is the ole “what to learn”. We cannot forget the more necessary “how to learn”. For when formal education ends and life begins, the how to learn thing becomes far more important, because this is what arms each individual to continue learning after formal schooling ends.

As this old guy looks hopefully to the next generations, the glass is looking very nearly empty, because my deductions suggest serious deficiencies in both the “what” and “how to learn” in education these days. Now, the experts in today’s education system and the folks who encourage them would disagree. Perhaps we might address my conspiracy theories at some other time, These are only my deductions, so take three times daily with a grain of salt.

The products of this education system are no more stupid than my generation, but they often are shamefully less educated. Thus unarmed, some lack understanding of, and respect for, those mysterious elements in life they missed in their education. You know, things like the work we veterinarians do. It is no surprise to me that there is one important reason we veterinarians face such vitriol from people who act like they don’t understand the difficulty and cost of the work we do. And that is simply because they don’t understand the difficulty and cost of the work we do. The folks responsible for their education didn’t prepare them to handle such complex notions.

And sadly, these people don’t even know what they don’t know.

Of course, if their expectation might be that the world can be made a perfect place, the complex, difficult, and costly work we do should be provided for free to everyone. We might suggest that perfect is far from obtainable, but again we face an education system that seems to be leaning toward the economic models that favor everything free to everyone, so this is small wonder.

Another of my deductions, take at your own risk, is that there are two kinds of people. The HAVES and the HAVE NOTS. The HAVES get all the breaks, have all the money and all the power, and they stay up nights plotting ways to get more breaks money power from that other group, the NOTS. The NOTS of course suffer a lifetime of abuse at the hands of the HAVES.

This is another one of my conspiracy theories, but don’t you wonder why this sense of HAVES and NOTS has become a core concept in the education of today’s youth? Again, no time for this argument now, but could one of the reasons we veterinarians encounter such vitriol from some really angry people possibly stem from the notion that they consider us to be HAVES, and they are relegated to NOTS status. Not their fault, but certainly ours. Because that’s what they have been taught.

Small wonder we become money grubbing thieves to some folks when we think we are simply dedicating our lives to a really difficult task. We think we are the good guys who are trying to help, and some think we are the enemy.