In a song years ago, John Lennon asked with another year over, “What have you done?” In 2024 at year end, we will have to ask what has happened to our country; will the threat of retribution from a returned president materialize? Years ago in Kane County, the remains of mastodons were discovered. In an equal time in the future, will survivors ask what did they do to their form of self governance? Like mastodons freezing out of existence, did the people of that time cook themselves into an ignored warning of global warming?

We need to consider whether the benefits of science should be ignored by some in power to re-create the dread of the dead of the COVID era. We are essentially past the worst of recent times. Interest rates are declining, inflation is dropping steadily, although the effects will take time to be alleviated. Employment has held steady, with the predictions of recession themselves receding. We have a border immigration problem; the attraction of this country, as it has been for hundreds of years, is stronger than the poverty burdens of foreign homelands. We need immigration, but of a humane and orderly nature. Buses are the cattle cars where people are shipped to destinations unknown and uninvited by angry politicians looking to look tough rather than helpful.

What will we do? What will we have done? Office seekers with hard but easy answers are to be distrusted as problem makers not solvers. We endured the lunacy of idiotic but deadly anti-science boosters in high office and we must look to sound ideas and sound solutions and those who offer them. Putting off to tomorrow and the future makes us the mastodons of now, but we can reason our way to better ways ahead. We must.

Edward Marth

St. Charles