To the Editor:

Our current enemy is the most irrational ever.

America has always needed a bad guy. When I was a kid, it was the Soviet Union. Like the faceless MiG pilots who were the adversaries in Top Gun. Then it was Saddam Hussein in the early ’90s. Then it was Hussein again in the early 2000s along with Bin Laden.

Now who is it?

Science, logic, and reason. These are now the great enemies so many of us rage against. Our fear and anger at the cataclysmic COVID-19 pandemic have been manipulated into doubting and attacking those who are trying to mitigate and eradicate the destruction.

This irrational nonsense is killing Americans and dividing the country even further. If social media existed in the age of polio, it would probably still be around.

How can we combat this madness?

I would start by eliminating most of high school math (which 98 percent of us never use in our lifetime) and replace it with critical thinking or logic courses. Educating our kids in the numerous fallacies as well as the construction of valid arguments (which means that true premises deductively entail a true conclusion) would get rid of a lot of this nonsense.

Maybe more mental-health counseling would help too. We are all fearful and angry. But why? Few of us want to dig any further into these uncomfortable feelings and prefer to just find an enemy to project onto.

If more of us can choose to look inward, we might stop attacking those who are trying to save lives.

Christian Bivona

Warnerville

Schoharie County