since earliest childhood

[click image]

...

Mental conditioning is a very serious deficit.

Every year when I was a child, my parents would take my brother and me from our Los Angeles home to Las Vegas on vacation. Back then in the 1950s, Vegas was still a family-oriented holiday destination. Dad would drop a few bucks at the crap table while the rest of us basked in the sun.

I vividly recall, one late afternoon, looking out over the desert that stretched endlessly from our hotel and pointing to a rather eerie glow over the horizon.

"That's from the atom-bomb testing they do," Dad explained.

"But isn't that dangerous, Dad?"

"Do you think they would do it if it was dangerous?"

That was the average person's attitude at the time toward nuclear testing in the atmosphere: "They" wouldn't do it if it caused harm.

You keep acting as though I'm picking on you. You keep acting innocent. How does that address the problem? How do you expect more than utterly ineffectual griping for a world if you keep doing that?

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