Good Day Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners.

We extended last week's show, the project of reporting in,

and handing over the airwaves to our many listeners who were good enough to write us with reports from their part of the country and a number of folks who called in.

We started the show with Joe Ellis and it's, I just, I enjoy talking to him so much and hearing from him so much and we talked

about how he at one point and one of our conversations talked about he thought that it was going to take a national

tragedy of some sort or crises of some sort to kind of make us reset, think things over, and come together again and I believe

he's holding to that prediction.

You know, I just want to make the case for the humanities and for the liberal arts. In the old world, before all this came to pass,

people who lived in oral and primitive cultures would see a lunar eclipse or a

solar eclipse and they would throw themselves on the ground and pray for

deliverance and assume that the gods were punishing humankind and that it was the

end of the world. Well long come people like Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler, and

they discover that there is an orderly system in the universe and that an eclipse is not

God's visitation at all.

It's a phenomenon that occasionally happens when one orb gets in the way of another.

And it used to be that when plagues and diseases of this sort would spread

that people would throw themselves down and pray that God would forgive us

for our mighty sinfulness and so on. Knowledge is power.

Jefferson's favorite philosopher Francis Bacon,

the contemporary of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare,

said, knowledge is power.

When we know things, we can contextualize them and it allows us to

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