Care to hear from Middletown, Pa.? I love that place-name. It sounds so: representative. In today’s Impromptus, I have an item on American education, and environmental alarmism: You know, the wee ones are told that the earth is dying — no, that we, human beings, are killing the earth — and that they must be afraid, very afraid. The environmental nightmares of children must be something. How about teaching them to be afraid of political unfreedom? Of the suppression of unpopular, or unfashionable, ideas?

Anyway: A reader from Middletown writes,

Yes, the public schools do in fact teach that we are killing the planet by driving our cars, etc. When my daughter, who was in 3rd or 4th grade at the time, and I were driving somewhere, she said her teachers had told her that driving cars was harming the earth. I clutched the steering wheel and calmly asked her if those teachers drove their cars. She paused — I could see the lightbulb over her head — and said, “Yes, they do.” It was priceless.

Of course, you can decry something even as you engage in it. But still: Well done, by that mom. And how about Al Gore’s jetting around? Etc., etc.