Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver. –Garrison Keillor

I have an affinity with Garrison Keillor’s admission. Most of my reading comes from snippets of books, articles, and other sources that fall within my view via television or onto my lap for free at medical offices. A short attention span and a page-to-eye-to-brain dysfunction have created a chronic focus issue that accounts for most of my literary shortcomings. Even as a child I paid attention in class only when I wasn’t daydreaming or fanaticizing, and I relied on a weak but satisfactory memory to get me through the various grade levels. Homework, recitation and other ungodly ways of filling my head with topics of ancillary and specious value were not part of my early habits. Suffice to say I am the antithesis of what the education profession believes underscores scholarship or coherency.

And that brings me to the two words that are central to my confabulations today; namely, they are “confused” and “hot-heated.”

A quick trip to the dictionary discloses what I had suspected: These two words mean “mentally and/or physically disoriented” and a “predisposition to become enraged and to fly off at the handle.” In most discussions these two terms are self-evident as to their undesirability when it comes to seeking out prospective friends, colleagues, or sex partners. They could be apropos when looking for characteristics in lions, and tigers, and bears to keep on your premises to hold unwanted others at bay.

I will grant that nearly the entire world thinks in ways that differ from mine—and we are all probably the better for it. I work in fits and spurts; I buy on impulse; and I have been known to walk away from conversations in order to lay down and take a nap. About the only time that I spend hours in deep concentration is when the subject at hand has no discernible relevancy to any person, place, or thing. That’s when I’m in my element. But the harm done is generally limited to me, to my mental and physical well-being, and pretty much to the exclusion of all others and their concerns. Although I often seem to be confused, I rarely if ever combine my confusion while assuming a state of hot-headedness. To do so would surely disqualify me in the minds of others as their first choice to pilot an airplane in which there were passengers; they would most likely not want me as a pharmacist filling their prescriptions; and most assuredly they would not want to hand me direct and exclusive access to the nuclear codes that could end the human race as we know it.

And so I must now confront the issue of my concern directly: By what stretch of logic, of coherency, of concern for self and for others; and when following the progression of knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation is it possible for an otherwise sane segment of our population to act so deliberately and so perfunctorily in handing the nuclear codes to one of the few persons on this planet who so positively and so overwhelmingly is both confused and a hot head?

Where are the psychiatrists, the neuropsychologists, the engineers, the mathematicians, the weapons systems experts; the elementary school teachers; the theologians; the self-directed philosophers--and the scholarly bus drivers when we need them most? When did the wisdom of this eternal imperative lose its relevancy—“Be careful of what you ask for?”

It is too painful and too unimaginative for me to ponder or to absorb how three million voters short of a majority could place a check mark next to the name of someone who is hell bent on killing us all. What explains such behavior? In whatever way you may try to answer that question, please spare me the comment that is so shallow it flies away without need of wings--“that’s just sour grapes.”

That is not sour grapes. It is several billion tons of TNT wrapped up in warheads criss-crossing oceans and killing animal and vegetable life in global blasts of fireballs the likes of which hell hath no equal. It is extinction in milliseconds. It is stupidity gone berserk. It is the most insanely outrageous act of self annihilation that can be concocted in a single act that an amoeba would never think to commit. It is a violation of every orderly or disorderly act of blasphemy against the universe. It is a summoning of the Day of Judgment; it is a pardon for Hitler and all the tyrants of history; it is the final reckoning when that second-place group collectively looked at themselves in the mirror of life and said “I’m expendable.”

Somewhere out there beyond our solar system is a plaque attached to the space craft Pioneer 10 that proclaims our good intentions to the universe. We sent it on its journey in 1972. It is our envoy for peace, love, understanding, and good will. Was Pioneer really a messenger for all the thinking, and the praying, and the building, and the doing and the posturing that occurred on Earth since the Big Bang; or was it all just a prelude to an act of planetary suicide that some want to shrug off with the callously cold comment known as sour grapes? Inquiring minds want to know, and this time, so do I.