Bertrand Russell debated the Jesuit Frederick Copleston on the existence of God in 1948 on the BBC.  Bertrand, although he would win a Nobel Prize in literature in 1950, had a pessimistic view of the universe, since he had found out that according to entropy (see one of my other blogs) the universe will end in death. Russell felt no god he could worship had that kind of purpose.  Yet scientists still don’t know how life brought growth and order into an entropic universe.

Bertrand Russell said in that debate, “the universe has crawled (toward) a condition of universal death.”  He had learned about entropy, and was using it to buttress his pessimistic view, as quoted by Brian Greene in Until the End of Time.

Did not Fr. Frederick Copleston convince him that a Father who would raise his obedient Son from the dead and who made good on all the Son’s promises would let that Son appear to bring the End Times to a glorious finish?  And Russell got a Nobel for literature?  I have a more dramatic sense, (Nobel Committee take note) and I believe its source is the mysterious source of Life on Earth.  Sure, the universe will end, but it’ll be a glorious one.

I grew up in Manhasset, N.Y. and never felt even a hint that I was a privileged white boy.  One of my friends had a friend named Jim Brown, who lived in the Manhasset Valley, but Jim soon set us straight lest we think anything about what the activists call white privilege.  Jim excelled at all the sports offered at Manhasset High, except maybe tennis.  Then he went on to Syracuse University on a scholarship, room and board and all tuition paid.  How’s that for an underclass man?  By then we were finished with high school, looking around for a reasonable college, maybe here at home.

Jim went on to prove to us that we dealt with few underclass men.  He was signed on by the Cleveland Browns, and every Sunday of football season we knew that we had never known an underclass guy.  Jim was no George Floyd.  In fact, as far as I know, he never had a rap sheet.  And believe me, Jim was a girl’s dream in looks and most often, deportment.

There are times in life, of which we are ignorant, where we have to admit someone else had been kinder or more virtuous than we.  That has to be Bill, who when he was leaving as a gardener’s helper from the Sands Point estate of Clarence Buddington Kelland, recruited me to help the aging German gardener, Gus, and to take his (Bill’s) place.  It never occurred to me to view it that way.

The following year I had the opportunity to be a summer scoutmaster at Camp Wauwepex at almost twice the salary.  But do you think I thought of recruiting a buddy to help the aging Gus?  Think of the prestige!  Kelland was the former short story writer for The Saturday Evening Post, a great magazine in my early youth.  Nothing as considerate as that entered my mind.

Being a provisional scoutmaster, as they called the counselor job, was good experience for me, but I failed to match the lesson in consideration Bill had set for me.  Today, I remember Gus in my prayers, the only alternative still open to make up for my selfishness.

It seems to be a repeated story that the experts get something wrong and a child corrects them.  The economists (Krugman et alii) got it wrong, and the child (that’s what they called Trump) got it right.  We are now in an economic uptick and the Republicans can capitalize on that in the next elections.  The only thing in the way is the pandemic and governors like Georgia’s, who won’t allow face masks.

Despite some irritating personality traits, Trump has succeeded in correcting what was wrong with America, and the middle class has read him correctly, including his invention of the term “fake news.”  The America that reads the news today is far more critical than the America that read the news before Trump.

I still believe in something called Providence for America.  We have been saved from the neo-Marxists, like Bernie Sanders, and the misnamed Black Lives Matter, and though the alternative is not always to the point, we are doing much better than we would under either of those two imposters.

Steve Jobs believed that his ultimate goal was to find enlightenment, a search he conducted after acquiring his first million.  He went to India to find a guru named Baba, who had just died before he arrived.  He lived in a cement hut in the Himalayas to find what he was looking for.  And he finally settled for Buddhism.  Buddhism?

He lived in the most advanced civilization this world has known.  He even upbraided Bill Gates for being too materialistic.  And he couldn’t find what I never had to search for—it was handed to me in elementary school—the Jewish Messiah, Jesus Christ.  Talk about an ill-fated search for Steve Jobs.

I think he could have found earthly bliss with ChrisAnn, whom he tried so hard to persuade not to have an abortion, and who gave him his daughter, Lisa.  But perhaps he found earthy solace with his wife, Lauren.  Anyway, we all have a quest, big or little, and sometimes we find, and sometimes we don’t.