Picking up Speed

The only thing I like less than traffic is traffic circles, but that is just my favorite complaint. With traffic, especially on I-5, have you ever been in a major slow down, seen on your maps app that it will open up in a mile or so, and you really expect to see a doozy of an accident when you reach the appointed mile? Then when you arrive, the lanes did open up and you did start picking up speed again, but there was no visible problem? Why is there still so much traffic?

There probably had been an earlier accident. But there is a phenomenon where a past event has lagging consequences. Non-technically it’s like a compressed spring that takes time to uncompress. The technical term for it is Hysteresis:

term used in physics, engineering, economics, and even psychology to describe a phenomenon where the effect of a force (or input) on a system depends not only on the current value of that input but also on the history of past inputs. In other words, a system exhibits hysteresis when its response lags behind the changes in the influencing factors.

With traffic, once the accident is cleared, no one wants to keep driving slowly, and yet it still takes time to recover from the lag. Hysteresis explains economic lag, magnetic lag, emotional lag.

There have been three major, overlapping accidents that have caused quite the stop. The accidents happened a while ago, but we haven’t even really swept up all the broken taillight pieces. There’s enough little puddles of oil and gas on the road that any one of them might still catch fire.

1. Education crashed because people thought that God was unnecessary.
2. Education crashed because God’s people thought education was unnecessary.
3. Education crashed because in 2020 almost everyone thought the whole education system was unnecessary.

These aren’t going to be my talking points, they just describe our unfavourable conditions.

We are about to add a fourth crash according to some, where AI takes over all our jobs, and maybe AI will learn that humans are unnecessary.

This is why education starts with worship, why the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and why men are imago Dei before they are homo sapiens. Christ is Lord, ergo cogito.

On one hand, it’s hard to believe we have to keep making the case that education is good, let alone that good education comes with high expectations and high effort and high blessings. And on the other hand, favorable conditions never come.

But all are yours, and you are Christ’s, so Christ remains the one to whom we must give account. Who knows how much lag there will be? But let’s get our foot ready to hit the gas, and remember where why we started the trip in the first place.

I have three books that I stand up behind my computer on my desk in my study at home.

• Everett and Snohomish County: A Pictorial History
• Reflections of Marysville: A Pictorial History
• Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction

Better future down the road. Students with a larger language model who also know WHY and have WANTS. AI does not have any loves, no ordering. We have gifts worth dying for, and a God worth living–and learning–for.