For the Holidays, the End of The World as We Know It

December is the time for families, food, lights, and gift-giving, right?

Just as I’ve done for many years, I participated in dramatic readings of “A Christmas Carol” with actor friends at nursing homes and retirement centers, and helped serve hundreds of meals to low-income and homeless citizens at Temple Beth Israel synagogue on Christmas Day.

But my personal entertainment took an oddly apocalyptic turn in December. I don’t mean zombies and post-nuclear war battles, but actual, serious looks at Where We May Be Headed. This didn’t happen by conscious choice or design -- impulse decisions at the library and suggestions by friends in one of my book clubs set the stage -- but it’s odd how they all came together this month.

Carole and I had waited a while to get our hands on the first-season DVD set of True Detective from the library. Several weeks ago we raced through the episodes in barely a weekend. In the pilot, a monologue by Matthew McConnaughey’s character “Rust” Cohle includes the following passage:

I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist, by natural law. … I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming. Stop reproducing. Walk hand in hand into extinction … one last midnight … brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

How to Choose a College

My niece is a junior in high school. Discussions with her parents over Thanksgiving about her education plans brought back a memory about the time the head guidance counselor at my old high school asked me to speak to college-bound juniors about preparing for higher ed. I was either still in college or fresh out.

One girl asked, “How do you decide which college to go to?” I think it was the first time I had formulated my opinions about college in an organized manner, and I haven’t forgotten my answer. Here’s what I said.

“Well, there’s an orthodox method that goes like this. You decide what you’re interested in -- what you want to pursue as a career -- and then you go to the guidance center and study the school catalogs [this was before the Internet existed, for the average person] and find out which schools have a strong program in that field. Then you apply to them.

“Now, there are several things that strike me as wrong with this approach. First, when you’re 18, you don’t typically have a very clear idea about what you want to do. Odds are you will change your mind, maybe many times.

It Ain't Over, Folks. . . .

Although the mid-term elections took place a month ago, and Oregonians had begun to mail and turn in their votes as much as two weeks prior to that, the election results on Measure 92 -- the GMO labeling proposal I wrote about here on October 28 -- are not yet final.

As of Nov. 6, the measure appeared to have been defeated by about 10,500 votes. That’s a slim margin: out of nearly 1.4 million votes cast, the difference amounted to 50.4 percent “no” to 49.6 percent “yes.” Nonetheless, the Oregonian pronounced defeat for the GMO labeling effort.

But the results turned out to be much closer.

A sizable chunk of votes had not been properly signed. For our U.S. neighbors who don’t enjoy the luxury of vote-by-mail (and that’s still most of you, at this point), once you’ve filled in your ballot, you can place it in an optional “privacy envelope” -- with big air holes so your check marks can breathe, I suppose -- and then in a slightly larger, preaddressed envelope that has a line on the back where you’re supposed to sign your name.

The votes inside are not counted as valid if there’s no signature on the outer envelope. Roughly 13,000 Oregon voters failed to sign their envelope in this election. In the past, those votes were simply not counted, period; but a new state law allows election officials and campaigns to obtain the names of the people whose votes were thus invalidated so they could be contacted to correct the error.