An Interesting Thing Happened the Other Day...
- Frank Weber
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Frank Weber
Copyright ©2025
The other morning, my phone started buzzing, and then my landline (yes, landline) began ringing…both with urgent, worried calls, messages and texts from the school district.
Typically when this happens, there’s either some inflated, nonfactual ‘weather-related’ ‘emergency-of-worry’.
In the worst cases – it’s happened only once – it was because of school ‘lockdown’.
Fortunately, in that instance, it was a one hundred percent, student-caused false alarm.
But no matter because, either way, in that instance, I absolutely demand any and all communications be made.
The weather not so much.
But I’m biased. And I’m old.
Back in the blizzard of ’78, I still had to walk by myself for five blocks to get to school – and I was only nine years old. A strong wind or a heavy downpour or a ‘snowmageddon’ of a foot doesn’t get me as riled up as it does the ‘worrisome participation crowd’.
Anyway…
This day’s messages were all about the school temporarily losing its internet capability.
GASP!!!
THE HORROR!!!
NO INTERNET!!!
GASP!!!
I thought, “Ok…so what?”
The landlines still worked in the event of an emergency.
It just didn’t seem to me to be any kind of a crisis.
BUT…I asked my daughter when she got home why it was such a ‘big deal’.
And THIS is exactly why it was a crisis to the school district…
Without the internet, the teachers had “no way of teaching” as all of their materials are housed, in one form or another, on ‘the internet and in the cloud’.
“Don’t you guys have any schoolbooks to use?”
“Some teachers have a couple books but we just had extra ‘tutorials’ today.”
To those of us that went through actual seven-classes a day, five days a week, for the entire school year schooling, ‘tutorials’ are the same thing as study halls were to us.
Free periods to do whatever you wanted.
And then it dawned and me, and I even said it to her, “It’s no wonder the world is the way it is…it’s not that people can’t or won’t read a book, it’s that they don’t even know how to open one! They’re being taught they don’t need to!”
Of course, this comment instantly filled my seventeen-year-old daughter with adolescent indignation.
But it is true.
If you never open a book while learning or when teaching, then there are ZERO facts available to discuss or debate…or to teach you the facts you need to survive and prosper in this world.
In the absence of facts, there is little historical authority to use as a compass.
Any reckless, uniformed, agenda-driven opinion can be presented as ‘factual’ by the only perceived figment of authority in the school…the teacher.
Books serve as one helluva record of all that has been painfully learned and discovered in the uncountable millennia that came before us…as well as the horrible lessons that have been taught and suffered upon the masses along the way.
Sadly, books are being replaced with TikTok and YouTube.
It’s infinitely ‘easier’ to watch a thirty-second video and assume that you now know all there is to know on a subject than it ever will be to actually read the historical record of it.
It is also way too convenient a maneuver for those who would sway the uninformed and ignorant to their cause. Tragically, recently, that approach has been working too well for certain agendas.
It’s been working because, for some odd reason, these videos are NEVER questioned or researched – they are taken as gospel fact.
If you have no factual knowledge of history, you are quite literally doomed to repeat the mistakes you purposely ignored for the sake of a perceived, utopian comfort.
By the way, the irony is NOT lost on me that the majority of the people of which I speak, will barely be able to read what I’m writing, let alone understand the written word!
“So many words and so many BIG words and NO video to explain it all to me! THIS isn’t worth my time!”
Think I’m being overly dramatic? This same daughter said, and I quote, “I’m not sure what The Alamo is…I don’t remember ever seeing that.” (Not even from Pee Wee Herman?)
We don’t live in Texas but you don’t have to live there to know what The Alamo, was, is and continues to represent.
THIS is the underlying, pervasive danger of attempting to dispute and erase documented, historical fact.
Anyway…
Historical fact is the basis for future decision making and world improvements.
Without books, there is a definite, clear-cut absence of historical fact.
Without historical fact, there is nothing left but manipulative, erroneous interpretation.
There is nothing left but poorly made, uninformed, unrealistic, childish decisions.
The same breed of decisions that will only serve to push progress backwards and away from any true improvements to life and the world in general.
Screaming and yelling and stomping feet and blindly disputing and fighting against facts you don’t like does NOTHING to further progress of any sort.
Open a book.
Read that book.
Hopefully, that book will produce some real questions and ideas of substance in your mind.
Free thinking and free questioning are the ONLY entities that WILL EVER further progress.
Important note…‘free questioning’ does NOT mean argue and refuse to accept what you read.
It means to ask the questions about the things you do not yet understand.
Once you understand EXACTLY what has happened in the past and EXACTLY what was recorded in that book, you can then develop substantial ideas on how to improve – and maybe even change the world around you.
And do it WITHOUT going backwards using methods that have already been tried numerous times and have horribly failed each and every time they were attempted.
THAT is the supreme benefit of historical fact. It lets you see viable options and possibilities before you ‘jump’.
It should remove the idea that, “They just didn’t do it right…we know better”.
At the very least, it should force you to think before you ‘jump’.
Disputing and ignoring those that came before you with illiterate, foot-stomping, entitled, screaming diatribes WILL NEVER bring about foundational and lasting world change.
NEVER.
Open a book. Read that book. Learn from that book.
THINK FOR YOURSELF!
LEARN FOR YOURSELF!