Afterword

Abstract

Earlier, in Chapter 13, this handbook was described as a “response to the crises of our times”:

• The threat of a nuclear holocaust and an eternal winter. This will remain until we stop making, testing, and buying and selling nuclear weapons.

• Pollution. Shrinking rain forests. Holes in the ozone layer. Even sunbathing has become a health hazard. Too much exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which are getting through the holes in the ozone layer, can cause skin cancer.

• Substance abuse and dependency.

• The law-and-order crisis. Drug-related killings and the rate of crime in general that keeps going up all the time. Small wonder that Americans, calling TV stations and writing to newspapers, overwhelmingly have supported Singapore’s public caning of an American teenager for vandalism and theft.

• Poverty and homelessness. The United States, a nation among the richest in the world and the only superpower, has more homeless people than anywhere in the industrialized West.

• The decline of educational standards, the dropout epidemic, broken homes, juvenile delinquency, and teenage pregnancies. And now AIDS, the most merciless killer we have known.