If you want to know which way the wind is blowing, you can wet a finger and hold it in the air.  This will give you a good practical way of doing it although it is not very scientific.  You can figuratively do the same thing by reading the headlines to know where we, as a nation and a people, are going.

I tested the air this morning.  I found that more people are unemployed than this time last year, by over one million.  This is the same time that ground is broken for new building of “luxury” apartment units that cost upwards of one half million dollars each. In another, related matter, our government has relaxed rules that once protected millions more. Environmental protection is losing against environmental exploitation.  The finger in the air dries quickly when the wind blows down rules and scatters opponents of government intransigency. 

The wind is blowing across the world and fingers are drying in the areas where non-Muslims deny America’s leadership in the arts, democracy and government.  The Muslim world is shouting so loudly that we cannot escape hearing their anger and the heat of their militancy against us.  Put your finger in the air and you will feel the pressure of anti-Americanism in parts of the world where you wonder why any of the people there would care what we do over here. We cannot avoid noticing assassination and self-destruction to murder innocents. These do not require a wet finger to test the air. It is all about us.

The wet finger test may not be able to explain why but it surely indicates that our governmental leaders are out to destroy confidence in government while keeping themselves in power. The drive to turn over to entrepreneurial businesses what once was governmental agencies using civil service employees to provide professional guidance through confusing rules is supposed to bring about better government.  I do not see this happening but the test shows the drift in this direction. Anti-government and anti-Washington rhetoric makes the wind blow stronger.

Wet your finger in the air and you can see the anger of displaced Cubans about the “Grammy” awards and the presence of actual Cubans in the proceedings. Use the same test to see how people living in the two nations in the “Holy Land” are getting along together.  Unrest is there as there is in much of the world.

A wet finger is not much of a scientific test but it is just as good as the pundits who tell us what we should think.  The news is bad everywhere.