I received an interesting comment recently, on my post about cynicism in the environmental movement. Not just a comment but also a question about learning and facing situations where we are forced to learn against our beliefs. Like all good questions it was simply not possible to dismiss it with a short answer in the comment thread, so it gets its own post. The comment I got was this:

I’m joseph and 14 years old. And I NEVER belived once in global warming. But I hate it that my science teacher is theaching us global warming. I don’t realy want to particapate in it, but if I dont, I just might fail this class. And I don’t want that. what am i gonna do?

And what follows is my reply to Joseph, and the little bit of Joseph in all of us.

Dear Joseph,

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This morning I was up bright and early with a spring in my step and a purpose in my heart. While I slowly woke up in bed, I had decided that today I would shun all distractions and write like there was no tomorrow. A few hours of concentrated effort could easily earn me an article or three for my blog, and then I could go back to unfocused endeavours without as much guilt.

After making sure I was within the legal limit of sleepiness for operating a piece of computer equipment, I sat at my desk and opened up my note book (the real life dead tree one that I write my ideas in). Sure enough there were a good handful of article ideas, at least a couple of which I could tackle without too much research or other preliminaries.

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