Berkeley is bare but not barren at this time of year when throngs of college students suddenly vanish. Our grizzled hills are shrouded in what resembles a toxic fog, and the light brown, mammalian San Francisco Bay views can be perceived only in the mind's eye. It's a melancholy time of year and more melancholy than most because of the miasmic sink of the economy.
For every holiday party I attend, partygoers speak of job losses they've suffered this year, some as recently as this month of December when they have been laid off from relatively lucrative jobs as lawyers, engineers, and architects. Their adult children are returning to live at home because they too have lost their jobs or have never even seen a job after graduating from college. The imminent horrors of global warming pale in the immediacy of sudden mind death or SMD.
Work -- whether paid or not -- stimulates the mind, and when people are untethered from engaging in productive activity, even it's destructive in nature (such as war or encouraging consumption in useless and energy-sucking ventures such as Hummers and self-serving platforms for social media), the mind begins to atrophy. SMD is like a coma afflicted on the unemployed, and like the toxic fog in Berkeley's winter, it enshrouds the country.
At the same time, in Berkeley, the Athens of the West -- as I like to think of it -- our single high school, Berkeley High, plans to eliminate science labs because they tend to favor children from higher-income homes. The administrators voted to spend the money used to support science labs on disadvantaged students instead, no matter that some of these same students are attending science labs.
Silicon Valley was built on scientific discovery. It's the source of our wealth, both intellectual and corporeal. To dam that source so that all might drink of learning at a basic level limits the upper reaches of knowledge that some might achieve. I do think Berkeley school administrators have become blinded by ideology. They are also contributing to SMD, or even premature mind death, by stemming the development of curiosity and invention that science laboratories inspire.
It would be nice if Berkeley, like Athens, had its Sparta to keep it on its toes and in touch with reality. Maybe some day Oakland will rampage our classrooms with brilliant minds of its own -- the result of hundreds of science laboratories blooming in the Oakland schools.
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