To the Editor:

You say, “truth is singular, solid, and exclusive.” It is proven that two people can witness the same event and recall and characterize it very differently. What you mean is that truth is whatever you believe it to be, and your predispositions are immutable. Thousands who disagree with you or have lived a different experience are just…wrong, and likely “woke communists.” One example of your way of thinking is the horrifying situation in Israel/Palestine where insistence on binary choices of the Israeli Jews and Muslims have resulted in a potentially world-wide religious and political war.

Your argument that the Jews have a superior claim to the land because they inhabited Israel for four thousand years before the Diasporas, and the Palestinians for only the last thousand years, suggests that the US should hand over our entire country to Native Americans who were here first, at least 25,000 years ago.

When competing human interests are involved, binary choices often lead to disaster. That’s why negotiation and diplomacy are essential. The western allies should have foreseen this conflict when, in 1947, it surrendered a country inhabited by Arab Muslims to Zionists, without negotiation or compensation, and then let Israel “righteously” gobble up the land until all that is left to Muslims is Gaza and an increasingly diminished West Bank. This does not justify anti-Semitism. But restricting solutions to binary choices, as in “one or the other of you must cease to exist” is a reptilian conclusion of a supposedly intelligent species.

When you quote “Church Militant,” I smirk. Turgid, objectivity-free opinion is at hand. While 99.9% of scientists believe that human activity is responsible for rapid and irreversible climate reactions, atheist and Nobel Laureate Dr. John Clauser believes that "as much as it may upset many people, my message is the planet is not in peril…I believe there is no climate crisis." Goody for him. He has also called for the “termination of carbon-limiting measures which threaten…a terrible and dangerous waste of scarce money." A true binary choice: you can pay now, or you can really pay later.
As an aside, Michael Voris, who founded the radical far-right organization “Church Militant” to speak out against reforms in the Catholic Church and play an active role in right-wing politics, recently resigned for unidentified “very, very ugly truths from my past that I have avoided facing...there are things that I have to …address and work on. They are horrible, ugly things.” May he find the peace he seeks but, given his attacks on the LBGTQ community, the climate crisis, and other issues he deems as "woke," his election denial and determination that all Democrats are communists and “not real Americans,” these lurid admissions pique interest.

You, Dr. Clauser, and Michael Voris, are entitled to your exotic point of view in defiance of "overwhelming scientific consensus.” But when freshwater is gold, humankind will not get a do-over.

Kelly Scoles,
Fillmore, Ca