Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast.

Today is Tuesday, February 8th, 2022. I am John Pudhord, the editor of commentary with me as always executive editor,

a Greenwald Hyay. Hi John, senior writer Christine Rosen,

high Christine, and associate editor, no, Ross, but I know, hi John. Yes, the March issue of commentary is closed and I am

commending to your attention. Our cover story now were pretty soon to be available on the commentary.org website,

the unbearable bleakness of American schooling by Robert Pondisio, a really remarkable piece about,

let us call it the moral and spiritual addiction in American public schooling to accounts of the United States as being bad

and the kind of learned helplessness that is being encouraged in our children when it comes to political change

and the nature of the American political experiment. It's really a remarkable piece and I think it dovetails a tiny bit

with the most astonishing piece of journalism that any of us has read in a long time, which was a piece in the Sunday New York Times

about therapists who are seeing an increase, dramatic increase in their practices, in people coming to them

because their lives are being destroyed by their anxiety about climate change. Apparently this is now a sub therapy in

in American therapy where people sort of specialize in dealing with people who wander in their houses and they

look at a piece of plastic and they go, oh my god, that's going to raise the temperature of the plan at 11 degrees.

What about my children? How are my children going to survive? The piece intentionally or not was a master piece of black comedy, I would say,

because basically what it showed is that there are people suffering from, let's say, obsessive compulsive disorder, unwanted thoughts,

intrusive, unwanted repetitive thoughts and there is now an entire branch of the world of psychotherapy to practice

that is designed to make those thoughts worse. You go to the therapist in order to have your irrational, obsessive, consuming concerns validated and deepened

and there's a woman in the course of the piece, there was a woman who said something like, I don't know, I think about my children,

what if the water levels brought, like my children are going to drown or something like that and he said, even when the disaster comes, even when the water rises,

your children will have good days, your children will have good days, that is his effort to calm her down.

So I tie that to Robert Pondisio's piece because this is a condition we have talked about intermittently on the podcast since we started the podcast,

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