It’s Saturday evening here and I am enjoying a long weekend. But what to write about today? I don’t know.

I, like most of you, have been horrified by what has transpired in Nepal and Tibet this week. The videos are so post-apocalyptic that they are barely comprehensible to me and it’s even more chilling for the simple fact that I believe that we stayed in that very same river valley (right on the river) with a group of students on a school trip when I lived in Bangladesh. I do hope that we keep this tragedy in our minds and don’t let it just fade away like most things that happen in the world nowadays.

I have a long-running theory that the internet has made time irrelevant. Nothing exists in the past anymore and the future doesn’t seem like it’s there either. I see this in my students, who have a tendency to listen to music outside of the time period in which it is presented. If you told me in 1995 that I would see kids listening to Michael Jackson and doing Michael Jackson moves in the hallways in the year 2026, I would have laughed at you. The fact that they have erased who the man actually was is a triumph of propaganda in a way that one can only admire, right up there with Tiananmen Square in its Twilight Zone-esque, we are through the looking glass way that the world seems to exist nowadays.

I mean, one thing that fascists have a tendency to understand more than people who oppose fascists is that if you just say something enough times to enough people, the people will start to believe it. That’s probably what Trump excels at and we seem to have a media landscape that endorses and promotes that speech in a way that makes us collective idiots. If we just pretend that Michael Jackson wasn’t a pedo, maybe he won’t be. If we just pretend that Trump won the election, maybe he did. That seems to be the prevailing notion that has embedded itself in this day and age.

And many of us can see this happen in real time (hence this newsletter). You fools! we say. Don’t you see what’s happening right before your eyes? They’re manipulating you! You’re being played for a fool! And yet, we do nothing.

So, we shouldn’t just watch what is happening in Nepal and forget it. We should put it at the forefront of our minds and think, Why did this happen? What could have prevented it? What choices have I made that contribute to this tragedy? It’s that last question that hits the hardest.

We operate in a state of existence today that ignores these things. Especially the last question. What do you do on a daily basis that contributes to this? There used to be a sense of worry about what we were doing, but since Covid, we seem to have forgotten our collective responsibility to the world. We’ve all adopted a nihilistic approach to life that says, Well, I might as well get mine! Things like caring for the environment or making ethical choices in our day-to-day just seemed to vanish overnight. I look at things like sports betting or prediction markets and think, Wasn’t that illegal at one point? I look at things like crypto-currency and think the same thing. Have we really dropped so far that we just conveniently ignore the notion that Trump wants to name an aircraft carrier after himself and he’s actually doing it? Our lack of care about these things is killing us.

I think that people are just waiting. They’re waiting for someone to come along and save us all. That could be a sane world leader who will arrive to make rational choices that will make everything right or it could be some kind of stupid apocalypse of some sort that will just make the decisions for us. Either way you look at it, people want to believe that the choices are out of our hands. And folks, I’m no better with all my AI talk and my jet-setting lifestyle. There’s something wrong with the world and I’m included in all that.

All of this stems from my wonderful wife. We were sitting in the car the other day and I was talking some AI nonsense and praising it all and she pointed out a very simple fact to me. She said, “Do you think our students in school know the kind of environmental impact that AI has on the world? Do we even teach that?”

That was stunning to me. We used to celebrate Earth Day. We used to preach recycling. We used to care more than we do today. What happened to that? Tracey’s questions made me think, because at our school, we never mention the environmental impact of AI. Some teachers might, but the notion that it’s ignored is frightening to me. After she said that to me, I made a quiet vow to change my approach. All because of my wife.

So, I will tell you all what I tell my students on a day-to-day basis. Be good people. Make your reading of this newsletter the start of a change that could make a difference in the world. Start making ethical choices in your every day, right down to the smallest things. In fact, the smallest things are the most ethical choices. You may not be able to change the world, but you can get things started. Model good behavior for other people. Model good behavior when no one is looking. Model good behavior.

As hopeless as the world may seem, I think there’s a lot to look forward to. But I no longer want to wait for those things to happen. I would like to start making that change today. I want the world to be better today rather than wait for it to be better in a future that may or may not exist.

That’s your motivational speech for the day. Now, I’m off to make a grilled cheese sandwich!