Fear is Elementary: Pun Intended, Read On!

My mother is a gifted resource teacher at Lehigh and Alva Elementary Schools. While teaching a unit on the rotation of the earth to her fourth and fifth graders, her facts and figures were met with a barrage of "critical thinking", in which the students inquired as to what would happen if the earth stopped rotating. They were concerned that if the planet ceased to spin upon its axis, the solar routine that drives our seasons, temperature, and night and day would be disrupted, eventually ending all of human life as we know it. For some of her students, this seemed to be a very tangible fear. "No immediate threat," she assured them. "Even if the earth did stop rotating, it would be a gradual slowdown over the course of millions of years. We have more important things to worry about." Of course she was right, and her students seemed to agree. "More important things, like global warming," said one of her fifth graders. It's so refreshing to know that today's youth has its priorites straight. Rather than concerning themselves with speculative astronomical tragedies, they have the practical sense to worry about speculative domestic ones. I do suppose climate change is more of an imminent threat to our false notions of a stagnant and harmonious natural state that preceded human life, but this seems to be the extent of the danger. Unfortunately, young children view the climate change phenomenon as more of a legitimate survival concern than a philosophical crisis, most likely due to a combination of parental and media-based fearmongering. The former seems more troubling. I find it hard to believe that a ten-year-old concerns himself too much with NBC's portentious climate segments, but their parents probably do. An atmosphere of fear permeates everyone in the household. Rather than tucking in their children and telling them to sleep tight, they apparently tell them to "sleep tight, until the rising oceans wash your home into oblivion."