Jan 11, 2025 2 min read

A best-selling book in 1986 by author and minister Robert Fulghum, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” was a collection of short essays that showed how the lessons we were taught in preschool and by our parents should serve as the basis for growing up to be good citizens and decent human beings.

Fulghum posited that the world would be a better place if adults followed the same basic rules they learned as children-sharing, being kind to one another, not calling others names, being truthful and ethical, and so on.

The results of the November election mean that in a little more than a week Donald Trump returns to office as the 47th president. And that’s after the events he led on Jan. 6, 2021.

It also means that our kindergarten lessons were worth virtually nothing for about half the electorate. Instead of an intelligent, caring, and empathetic candidate like Kamala Harris, we chose a man who cares only about himself, and seems to lack basic human decency. People swapped their long-standing values for supposedly cheaper eggs. Great trade, huh?

Trump’s lack of empathy and self-centeredness were on display the other day when, rather than speak eloquently about the death at age 100 of perhaps our most honorable former president, Jimmy Carter, he instead bemoaned the fact that U.S. flags will be flown at half staff during his inauguration.

Bernie Quarrick

Uniontown