Is the world inching toward the age that looms as its last hope: The Age of Women? It’s happening in the United States, as in other Western nations, and in some corners of Asia. But is there enough momentum to bring the world to a consensus of the senses, if you will, to keep the appetites of men from drowning us in climate change?

Much of the answer will flow from how they use their universal instrument of change where they have it: the vote. I’ve been saying this since well back in the last century. But it matters far more for women to say it, over and over and over. And far more yet when they vote their own interests ― as men have never feared of doing.

It’s been less than a century since the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by the  States, to qualify women to vote. But they were hardly prepared then to use it in a concerted way. In the absence of the Amendment, they had no reason to organize, or flex their potential.

They knew that the Constitution promised equality and equal protection under law. But it has never come of its own accord. After all, they were less than citizens when the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the amendment reaffirming equal protection were adopted. They’ve learned at persistent pain that they get it when they step up and take it.   “Establish Justice.” Women are about it now. A good deal of history in this century will be written, belatedly, in this struggle.

To prove more adept at using their vote, women are pushing hard at an equal priority that’s bound to sharpen their use of the ballot box: education. American women have made themselves not only a majority of undergraduate students earning degrees, but a growing majority at the same time. Three of every five degrees awarded now are going to women.

Their numbers are growing in almost every graduate school. It won’t be long before gender balance will define the professions. And that is bound to change, in not so subtle ways, the way the law works. Going back to the Victorian model, the law has always worked as not the rule of law but rule by the profession of the law. Always dominated by men, fattening their wallets wherever possible.

This is bound to change as women fill more practices and more benches. For one thing, they will soon demand and get equal protection ― the old boys’ network be damned! If the old boys aren’t seeing this, they better wake up very soon. While they go on doting on football and the new playoff scheme, and the South East Conference proving that the South won the Civil War after all, the lingering  ripples of the Big Recession have more than leveled the workplace, tilting more and more jobs toward women, because they are better prepared, and pushing as they should for equal pay for equal work.

What is all this saying to the world?  What will it mean? Hopefully it will dawn on men that they have to compete now with more than men in the job world. Merit has increasingly replaced privilege in higher education, except in big conferences of  football and basketball, who never let admissions standards stand in the way of a potential star.

The bigger challenge in higher education is to get the focus back on learning as first and foremost priority.  Not learning for learning’s sake alone, but better matched to the challenges facing the globe, at home and abroad. With this focus, community colleges have grown into the largest network of undergraduate studies, at the same time keeping athletics a minor distraction. When will the universities get it right?

Higher education must also help us to realize that the future of a stable world does not lie in consumer economics, nor in corporate power. It should be making the most of science, and showing us the way to live better by living simpler. It’s the choice that is the hope of keeping choice in people’s hands, by which they map and steer their future. It’s their hope of keeping freedom alive in the world, of holding off the tyranny that ignorance, superstition, and excessive wealth want to foist upon us.

Churches have been with us long enough to show that they are not the answer. They are all man-made. We know that because there are so many of them. The more science tells us about the vastness of the universe and its astounding age, the more apparent it is that we are guests on the one inhabitable planet among the several of our small solar system, barely a scratch of what’s in store out there. However deep our faith about a post-earth fate, the great truth of our existence is the earth, which holds all the known keys to our survival and the goodness it can give us if we treat it right.

Women will have a profound role in this awakening, if we are to evolve life styles in which we live with less threat of self-inflicted extinction. Women have been conditioned over centuries to think first of the family. It’s the inevitable bearing that goes with pregnancy and motherhood.

It will be American women who form the model and set the pace in this awakening. They must claim sole voice for personal health decisions. Unmitigated and unfettered procreation can only expand the vast legions of both the homeless and the unwanted children, which are another growing pale upon the world. American women are showing women everywhere that they can get out front in the world, through education and a game-changing presence in the world of work for pay. Honest labor ― not corrupted subservience.

Might the corrupted subservience that men accept in their mania for football be a conspiracy wrought or abetted by women? Are mothers, for reasons of their own, encouraging sons to try football, knowing the risks of permanent injury are high, and even life-threatening, and less likely to end in a worthwhile degree than would strict devotion to the education itself? Women have now more than leveled the playing field in higher learning. While men have grown football into the leading entertainment industry, women also are leveling the competition of the workplace.

As they claim the greater share of jobs in the post-recession economy, because they are better prepared, are they turning the second century of their right to vote into the Century of Women​? I’m betting on it. With a second Super Bowl on the horizon to clarify and satisfy college dreams, male dreams, of a true national championship, women will gladly set the tables and feasts of the two biggest holy days on male calendars to please their spouses, while they go on building their momentum in the workplace. When will American men see that Big Mo is no longer on their side, gridirons aside? Not soon enough to take it back. Nor reason enough.

Ironically, the centuries of exploitation and subversion have prepared women for this challenge. And they have science on their side, whether the question is personal health or global warming. If anyone can show the world how to go on living by living simpler, women can. But men will have to  lessen their addictions to ego, power, sex, war, ignorance and superstition for it to happen. Looming as the biggest obstacle in this century is corporate power, flexed in global trade. But before the century is done, I count on women with Big Mo and science on their side to turn consumer economics  into a friend of less materialism and simpler living. I am confident they are up to it, made doable by boys always being just boys.

Frank Mensel ― September 2014

How do we go about saving a world, most of which is unwilling to take responsibility for its fate? That question is never far from my mind. Yet no answer comes quickly or easily. What I see and feel is the imperative of reason.

It should tell us where responsibility lies, and how to apply it.

Science has been growing in influence, as it should and must. But it is not yet proving a match for superstition, which for far too long has been the hydra-headed monster ruling human affairs, mostly in the form of numerous churches. The proliferation of religions is the surest evidence that they are man-made. It expresses painfully the willingness of too many people to let others do their thinking for them. It’s an attitude that has fed ignorance and stupidity throughout history, as it undermines both principle and serious faith.

Nor is science close to a match for corporate power, which has surged on globalized commerce, and boosted by the Supreme Court’s egregious 2010 Citizens United decision, ruling that corporations are people, enjoying full First Amendment rights. Nothing was farther from the Founding Fathers’ minds than corporations. It’s ridiculous to think the Founding Fathers would see them as people.

The greatest gift the universe has given humanity is intelligence, the power of reason. How can we think of ourselves as the literal children of the Creator when we default on the persistent exercise of the greatest gift​? It’s by neglect of this gift that we reap ignorance and stupidity, and by its pursuit that we are rewarded with knowledge and science.

From it comes the strength to cope with reality. Yet reality is not easy to deal with because it swims in facts, which also are not always easy to face. It’s easier to turn to faith, and look to churches for answers. It may also explain the growing abundance of ideologues in politics, which is made more challenging by both the growing complexity of the world and the rising threats to human existence.

Is it the evangelical movement that has given us the Tea Party, pushing hard and profiting from propositions they can’t prove. As many a scholar or philosophy and religion keep reminding us, religion is fact free. Whatever troth any faith claims as inspired truth is woven of entirely synthetic threads.

It’s difficult to see anything in the Tea Party that looks inspired. Or is rooted in science.

Take its unrelenting demand for smaller government. How does smaller government cope with the needs of a steadily growing nation?  If California should choose in its November election to break itself into six states, or five more, it can only mean more federal government, with 10 more senators and the trappings that go with the office. Texas could be tempted to follow suit, since its constitution allows it enact itself into five states. All such new state governments could only mean more government overall, more state payrolls, more loads of state regulation, and a larger federal system in the bargain.

The government we have seems unable to man up to the menace of climate change.  A shrunken Tea Party government would be helpless to meet it.

So the Tea Party holds no promise of saving the world. Are the evangelicals up to it? Hardly, with so much of their energy devoted to harassing women who claim the freedom to choose. Why can’t they see that unfettered procreation and legions of unwanted children are as much a threat to a sustainable world as climate change? But then, science and the Tea Party will never be bedfellows.  Nor will science and the evangelicals.

It’s appalling ― yes, shocking ― that there are no serious plans in circulation for saving the world. None, of course, from any churches. None would be expected since most churches are bent upon getting us to another, better world, for which the universe, in all its vastness, offers no evidence. The Hubble is showing vastness as far away as 13 billion light years ― an expanse that boggles even the ablest minds. How much proof do we need that our tiny sun and tiny planet leave us on our own?

I keep supporting the Council of Concerned Scientists in the hope that they will step forward. But no luck yet. If the substantial network of the better minds of science are as concerned as they profess to be, they ought to have a plan. For starters, how about a dozen essential steps we must face and make to sustain a healthy planet, without which we can’t possibly endure.

Even serious business minds are recognizing that two challenges must be met to keep life worth living: clean water and clean air, both sufficient for the long term for at least the population already in place. It can’t be easy with the ice caps and glaciers melting relentlessly away. What will the great bastions of progress, North America and Europe, do when there are no glaciers to keep their rivers working through the summers? The threats to the groundwater supplies are also multiplying, around the world.

Scientists and science have to do more. More than the larger knowledge of what’s already going on, they must push for better estimates of what’s possible. They must pull no punches on reckless waste of resources, including the senseless extravagance that the selfish fat cats heap upon themselves. There’s no place in a mature and caring world for “we do it because we can!” Such fools ought to see that such behavior darkens the future even for their own kin. Only Andrew Carnegie got it perfectly right when he said, “the rich man who dies rich dies in disgrace,” then acted accordingly.

In the quest of pushing humanity to face up to reality, science must do more to bring colleges and universities along. Scientists must speak bluntly to fellow scholars. Help them see that the stakes in every discipline have become global. It’s a responsibility far bigger than tenure ― though, admittedly, tenure has served discipline well, but not without regulation.

American universities are doing too little to match American talents to global needs and market demands. Higher education is the best hope of softening corporate power that is both making its own rules for global commerce and, with Supreme Court complicity, trampling on the Bill of Rights. The law profession has become so inbred, so intrenched in its own technical domain, that it has lost sight of the Constitution and the rule of law. What we have instead is rule by the profession of the law. Its idea of self-regulation through the Bar Association is hardly different from letting the patients run the asylum.

One of best business minds I’ve known stressed to me in the last century that a grave challenge free people will face in the 21^st century is waste management. How prophetic he was! The back alleys of every city are a sickening sight. We may keep the collector trucks on schedule, but who’s going to pay for repaving the roads and preserving our water, sewer and power systems? Outdated  and failing systems breed more waste.

The best I find myself able to do is challenge students to live better by living simpler. Much simpler. Capitalism must spread wealth more than it concentrates it. It’s that simple. I keep my showers to three minutes or less, and just three a week. We’ll soon be a one-car family.

Consumer economics no longer answers our real needs. Actually, it never did. Real needs are about living in harmony with the earth and our environment. That environment today is hurting for attention, for repair.  Hurting badly. The economy of survival is the economy of greening up, of reversing the harm that our carbon-centered living has heaped upon the planet. It’s an economy that easily could drive more jobs than excessive materialism has ever given us. It’s the challenge that holds our fate. It means reinventing our homes, our appetites, our agriculture, our communications, our transportation, our way of life. The exploding technology that we are mastering is more than ample for the job, if we are.

It’s rising power of problem-solving is undoubtedly ample for making us best-friends with nature. All we must do is get out of our own way. Again it’s a challenge at which the USA must lead. It means reordering our priorities. Our national security increasingly lies there, and not in the wasteful, endless arms race. It will mean nothing to still stand as the lone superpower, if we stand in a wasteland.

That means taming corporate power by redirecting it. Let corporations prove they really are people, as the Supreme Court casts them. Let them prove that they are more than market manipulators, or matchless arms makers. That they can team with science and technology to give us a livable world, a world where two things always matter most, in this order:  earth and people. The multi-nationals have grown power bigger than nations wield. They’re making the rules now in global commerce and intercourse. Surely they understand reality: unless they prove they are people by putting mankind first, by making the bottom line serve that priority, there’ll soon be no world to spare them.

If our existence has taught us anything, it’s that life requires discipline to work positively. Discipline in every phase: self, family, community, job, government, business, the arts. It must start with each of us taming and recasting our appetites, putting others, the greater good first. More guns can’t and won’t save us. The real hope lies in science, in proving it right by working with it, by letting it lead us away from ignorance and superstition, away from rigid, top-down orthodoxies and ideologies, and into a state capable of working facts into favorable actions and ends. Favorable to both earth and man.

Frank Mensel ― August 2014

As the western world joined us in the commemoration of DDay, the words “who we are” were raised often. They sum up perfectly why American forces were afloat on the choppy currents of the English channel leading the Allied forces in the costly invasion of France, whose success would spell the doom of Hitler’s murderous Axis. Germany and Italy would fall in just ten months, and Japan four months later.

Victory transformed America dramatically. It rose from the crippling unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression into the unifying grip of war and sacrifice, shouldered by an unprecedented partnership of private and public enterprise that became the industrial giant that decided the war. Its output made DDay possible, and ultimately successful. The war effort as a whole, as much as any event since the Revolution, was written in “Who We Are.”

Seventy years later, it asks how much are we the same”Who We Are.” The sacrifice in 1944 was plain to see: freedom must endure. It was an imperfect freedom then. It’s an imperfect freedom today. But how are the battle lines different today than they were then?

The victory in WWII was clearly a victory for WeThePeople. The war ended with more than 16 million Americans in uniform, almost 15% of the population. It was a victory for the Founding Fathers. A victory for the Constitution. More than a handful of nations, emerging from the war, made our Constitution the model for writing their own.

But in the 21^st century, the battle lines on freedom have been redrawn, and they challenge us to prove anew “Who Are We.” Against the painful memories of the reckless Twenties and the Great Depression, the war taught us that the common good is the reward of finding common ground. It showed us that the America envisioned so richly in the Preamble of the Constitution was reachable.

The wish on everyone’s lips, as the GIs poured home, “a car in every garage, a chicken in every pot,” was soon eclipsed by bigger dreams, as college degrees and homes on loans were defining a bullish new middle class, working up a life style on a scale without precedent. The United States was quickly the envy of the world, as much for its matchless breadbasket as for its surging middle class. These successes repeated in the postwar world would show again “Who We Are.”

Now, in the 21^st century, we find ourselves fighting very different wars, yet wars that again test “Who We Are” with much less clarity than the conquest of fascism. Terrorism and extremism are hitting us in many forms, from many directions, as often at home as abroad, by shifting mixes of ideology and ignorance.

Looking back on DDay from another century, what better occasion than this to give new clarity to “Who We Are?” It could well prove our best weapon against terrorism, extremism and corruption.

The extremists of religion and politics are just as determined as Hitler was to make the world dance their dance. To overcome this menace, the Free World must come together, showing “Who We Are” in anthems that bind freedom to science, because its revelations are the vista by which mankind will survive, or it won’t. Just as the West must eradicate corruption and condemn decadence, the Muslim world must expunge Jihad, once and for all. Claims of divine authority are not “Who We Are,” because they are void of fact. Only as science buries superstition is the world redeemable.

And, the world must unite in taming corporate power. Nations acting separately lack the power to do it. They must come together for a new DDay, one determined to universalize the rule of law, in a common code to which all subscribe. One that walks the talk of justice and equality.

In praying for the success of the DDay invasion, FDR said the mission was to “set free a suffering humanity.” He called it a “righteous cause,” riding on a spirit that must “never be dimmed.”

Among nations, there is no cause more righteous than rule of law, nor any cause presently less true to its spirit. Nowhere in practice does it live close to that spirit. That spirit is not winning in the courts of western nations, and even less so in the rest of the world.

In the United States the law amounts in practice to rule by the profession of the law, in which justice stands second to the prosperity of the profession. It has roots in the Victorian model, in which justice was measured by the wealth and prominence of the practitioners. Lawyers often were the most prominent and wealthiest members of Victorian society, with doctors a distant second.

As American courts go about their business, the results most often favor the side that’s most heavily “lawyered up.” Which is just what the profession prefers: the quality of justice ought to reflect the size of the purse. To keep it an insiders’ game, it is consistently woven around technicalness, keeping principle and the Constitution on the shelf.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the spread of corporate power. As it distorts capitalism and erodes our middle class, it threatens the Constitution as much as it mocks it. Capitalism succeeds over time only if it spreads wealth more than it concentrates it. But corporate power does the opposite. It engenders oligarchy and inequality. As a result, the equal protection so emphatically promised in the Constitution remains unfulfilled in the 21^st century. Could there be a more righteous cause today in both the USA and the world? Nothing would do more “to set free a suffering humanity,” if it were the heart of every legal code around the world.

The elections of 2014 and 2016 will go a long way toward telling us whether WeThePeople still hold sway, or the Supreme Court has sold us out to oligarchy. In the infamous Citizens United decision, the court let technicalities win. The 5-4 ruling held that corporations are people, simply because they are formed by people. Can anyone show me how a corporation that resembles a person? Or that embodies any senses or sensibilities? I’ve yet to meet anyone who swallows other people, or bleeds profits. But why would we expect the Court to vote against corporate power? It’s the most lucrative work the lawyers get. After all, the Justices are lawyers, every one. The profession eschews humanity, as it builds its refuge in technicalities. Yet the growing power of women in the profession is bound to give it more humanity. The law may yet “establish Justice,” as the Constitution promises.

Clearly, the next DDay is overdue. The ever righteous cause of equal protection must rise around the world, to free still more suffering humanity. To rectify humanity’s oldest crime against humanity, the enslavement and exploitation of women. Women must build and steer the armada, with enlightened men gladly manning up as needed. Hope is growing, with American women pointing the way. As they grow their majority of college enrollment, they today claim three of every five new bachelor degrees. As they rise in number and rank in the workforce emerging from the Bush-Cheney recession, they are the changing face of  the new middle class. More and more, they are Who We Are.

Frank Mensel — July 2014