Monday
Here I am in DC. My home town. I awakened in my sunny apartment and started about my day. Nothing very interesting except lunch with my old pal, Nolan Rappaport, friends since 1956, at a Vietnamese cafe. Then a long walk with Nolan by the River and then a nap. Then dinner with my oldest friend — i.e., of longest duration — David Scull. David is a brilliant estates lawyer (Nolan is a brilliant immigration lawyer). He has been a soldier, a state legislator in Maryland, and generally a super productive human being. He had just flown in from Colorado and nevertheless had come down to have dinner with me. Fabulously kind of him. 

We ate at one of my favorite spots, District Commons, and David started scaring me, and he was right to do so.

Now, a few days ago, I talked to some kind people from a huge consulting firm about innovations and discontinuities in our society. They are talking or were talking about tech innovations around intellectual property and automation, or so I believe. Certainly, there have been plenty of them that have helped mankind. The Internet (I guess), jet travel, antibiotics, air conditioning. There have also been major innovations about human rights, namely about giving blacks equal rights with whites and women equal rights with men. Those have been giant.

But in my little pea brain, I was thinking of something I had seen on TV earlier in the day: That was a raid on a Trump Rally at Radford University in Virginia by several dozen screaming, furious black youths from the “Black Lives Matter” entity. The almost all white crowd was angry, too, and I mean really angry.

The whole scene was evil and made me think of how racially charged up those Black Lives Matter agitators are. They really want a fight. They seem to me (and I could be wrong, of course) to want to bully and frighten the white people at the Trump rally. But what did they expect? The Black Lives Matters people are just helping Mr. Trump. His implicit promise to white America is, “Yes, I’m a bully and a crude guy. But elect me and I’ll keep ‘those people’ out of your neighborhood.”

And there are “those people” and Trump’s fans are saying, “Yeah. That’s why we need Trump.”

Long ago, when demonstrators heckled George Wallace, he used to say, “Keep at it. Every time you do it, it’s another 100,000 votes for me.” I wonder if the Black Lives Matter people realize that if they keep after him, they will elect him. They probably haven’t thought that far ahead.

Electing Trump. No experience. No real ideas. No advisors. That would be a discontinuity but better than Black Lives Matter, at least to some people.

Well, that was a bit of an excursion.…

But the Black Lives Matter people, and David Scull, made me think of some wicked discontinuities in our future:

Crushing national debt. We have been living by stealing from our posterity for sixteen years now, and some day, we will default. This was David Scull’s main worry. He’s totally right. We have been ultra-selfish and spent our children’s money for decades now. When the piper’s bill must be paid, it will be a bad day.

Too few smart people. For a long long time now, the smart, educated classes have had few if any children. The idiots and drug addicts and welfare cheats have had a lot of children. This has had a big effect and it will get worse. Intelligence is largely inherited and we have selfishly not passed enough of it on. It’s understandable. Raising kids in today’s world is a serious burden. (That’s largely due to the worst postwar idea — school busing.) It is quite easy to see why people don’t want many kids. But it has an effect.

Closely related, we face the utter collapse of education in America. More than half of all nonwhite U.S. school children are not literate at grade level. About one in four are illiterate altogether. A good chunk of white children are not meaningfully literate either. We cannot remain a first world nation with this situation

This is too depressing. I had better stop and sleep. It’s just too damned depressing. David Scull just put too many thoughts in my head.

I will lie in bed now and look at the lights of Northern Virginia.