Charles (Chuck) Kensinger

When this term began to flourish many years ago, I thought it was like the phrase youth in Asia from the 1970s. If you are not old enough to remember that decade, I will tell you a story. In history class, one day our teacher asked us to choose teams to debate a topic. I was a debater and was excited about the assignment.

My friend and I easily paired up with two other friends to oppose and choose our topic. We selected pornography and picked a court case about the book “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and discussed the idea of whether the book was pornographic or not. I have yet to read the book.

The humorous part was when the group that selected Youth in Asia began their debate, and it had nothing to do with Asia but was about people being allowed to commit suicide. One of the debaters stated that he thought the punishment for this should be the death penalty. That comment got him sent to the office.

For my younger readers, you can see that our generations are no smarter than yours. I had never heard of euthanasia at that time. If you do not understand a term, do some research or ask someone smarter than you. I could not find anyone who could define the term systemic racism for me. They knew racism; only how the term systemic applied confused them as well.

My research since that time has uncovered the true cause of this problem. It is not the systems in place but the individuals running the governments involved. I think the first I heard of this was in the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. While the officer who killed Mr. Brown was never charged or convicted of a crime, the city police department underwent many systemic upgrades due to the incident.

This type of event sparks changes all over our country. The most current ones involve U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers who have killed innocent people and claimed that they interfered in their investigations. These cases range from Maine, Texas, Virginia, and beyond. There have been problems in Greene County, Missouri, where I live, as well, with this department of the Federal Government.

The point I want to make is that no system is perfect when imperfect humans are responsible for enforcing the laws. Maybe we should eliminate the human element and assign these tasks to Artificial Intelligence? This is an oxymoron because while they may be artificial, they are not intelligent. They make mistakes as well.

You don’t believe me? Try these headlines for size: “Parents sue OpenAI for involvement in teenager’s suicide,” “xAI’s Grok makes antisemitic comments, lays out plan for assault,” “AI coding tool wipes out production database and lies about it.” That last one sounds all too human to me. Could it be that even something artificial designed by us will still have our flaws?

This is the main premise of my book “Cosmic Flatulence.” When we concoct a theory of the evolution of our world coming from nothing and no one, calling it the “Big Bang Theory,” isn’t that like saying God let a fart and all of this happened? I don’t have that much faith.

©Copyright 2026 by Charles Kensinger