One Day, One Week, Six Thousand Years

Here we are, smack in the middle of Winter Break, and I can't stop thinking about my job. That's probably a good thing. If I simply forgot what I do for a living over a two week period, I might just forget to go back. I am a teacher, and therefore when those "teaching moments" arrive while I am supposed to be relaxing in my palatial estate, I have to find something to do with them. Like this one: I just learned that the earth is six thousand years old. 
Six thousand years is a long time. That goes way back to before we were printing calendars and things had proper dates assigned to them. It goes back before Jesus. Way before. It's not like the people who figured this out didn't give it the time and consideration such things require. Six thousand years leaves room for the Sumerians' initial scribbling  about their floods, famines and wanderings almost three thousand years before the birth of Mister Christ. Whatever happened before they got it into their heads to start writing things down is of little consequence, since we all know that if something is really important, it will be written down. 
All this talk of clever apes aside, the challenge to this view of the earth's history suggests that the time before humans who wrote things down was very short. Maybe a little more than a thousand years? Of course all those good words that tell us that even though Rome wasn't built in a day, it only took a week to make a planet. And what a planet it is, where a woman can be elected to a seat in the Arizona senate and defend her views on protecting the planet, which in her view, "has been here six thousand years, long before anybody had environmental laws, and somehow it hasn't been done away with." Sylvia Allen, a member of the Grand Canyon State's legislature since 2008, has now been named the chairperson of the Senate Education Committee. This could be for her work uncovering the vast chemtrail conspiracy, or her plan for compulsory church for all Americans. It could be that her brain is two sizes too small.
And so I find myself sitting here, half way through the break our schools are given to contemplate the birth of Jesus Christ, wondering how someone who must have at least driven past the Grand Canyon can not take a moment to reflect on the enormity of what God or any creative force might have wrought over time on what used to be a nice flat piece of desert. Six thousand years ago. No need to panic, if you happen to live in the Valley of the Sun: Democratic colleague Senator Steve Farley said people shouldn't worry too much. In fact, he told the Arizona Republic he thinks she'll do a good job: "She's made some interesting comments to the public, but it's not like she's going to be teaching," he said. "We have accredited teachers for that."
One more week of vacation.