Why Are You Wasting Your Time and your Readers' Time?

Dear Dr. Waug,

My name is Yugo J. Navigadr, Ph.D., chairman of sociology at SuCasa Community College, and I'm fed up with all this nonesense about WAUG kids and the "Great Do Nothing Generation." Either you are a fool, or a madman, or some prankster who should be on MyFace. Isn't it clear that God rules the weather, the oceans, theland and the heavens? Isn't it presumptuous to think tiny little humans. like a swarm of mischevious ants, can destroy life on this planet?

Your crazy correspondence with imaginary WAUGkids from the future suggests you have not serious pen-pals and no idea what you're talking about. I'd like to know A. why your are wasting your time on this stupid blog and B. what kind of background you have to talk about the future and pretend to receive letters from kids who will be born seventy or eightly years from now.

My significant other, Marie, pointed out your posts about hydrogen cars and the some girl who will live in "Atlanta Shores" in the future. I looked at them, and glanced at a couple of others, and you are probably the biggest fool I've ever run into on the Internet.

Disappointed in you in SuCasa, California, 2008

Yugo J. Navigadr, Ph.D.
Chairman, Sociology
SuCasa Community College
SuCasa, CA

Dear Professor Navigadr,

Thank you for your feedback. I value the comments, flattering or unflattering, of all my readers, and yours in particular serves to make me ask, Am I Crazy? Or am I simply another Don Quixote, fighting with forces too vast for my weak abilities?

As for your comment about God, "Isn't it clear that God rules the weather, the oceans, theland and the heavens?" I mean no offense to God, but I also believe that God gives us intelligence, and when we use it rightly, we can foresee problems and try to head them off. Part of God's plan seems to involve mankind's use of intelligence, which is now able to assess the state of the earth's weather systems in ways thousands of times more powerful than ever before. All the science seems to point in only one direction: We can say that the earth we inherited from our parents and ancestors was quite different from the earth and its sky and oceans today, and all vectors seem to indicate than God will allow us to continue upsetting the world's climates until we wake up and take the actions needed to stop the imbalances and reverse the harm we've already caused.

Your second question, "Isn't it presumptuous to think tiny little humans. like a swarm of mischevious ants, can destroy life on this planet?" is raised by many serious thinkers, but the answer is, "No, it is not presumptuous, but rather, it is based on undeniable observations and conclusions of thousands of scientists of every kind worldwise." Our species, Homo sapiens, is the only one on earth known to "soil its own nest," and create waste dumps, toxic runoff, nuclear waste, and huge, dangerous and destructive dams, like the big one plaguing China currently, and the Aswan dam in Egypt, which has upset the annual cycle of soil renewal along the Nile and degraded the quality of the Mediterranean Sea as an environment for aquatic life.

My use of imaginary WAUGkids is a commonplace literary technique, used by the foremost political philosopher of recent times, John Rawls. of Harvard in this Theory of Justice and other works.

How i wish you a wonderful new year in 2008.

Dr. Waug