Over the weekend, I offered conclusive evidence of the wrongful, destructive, persistent and malicious denigration of manual labor over thousands of years of civilization, and to those who normally come here to be uplifted in your thoughts of workmanship and encouraged by our activities at Clear Spring School, I apologize for the length of the text and the amount of effort and forbearance that it may have taken to break through.

When Columbia University President Lee Bollinger "welcomed" the president of Iran to the Columbia University campus, he was careful to inoculate his students and the press against the the man's ideas.

Are we as careful in our universities to inoculate against the ideas of Aristotle? Can you see the destructiveness of his ideas as they have played out through thousands of years to marginalize the manual labors of craftsmen and women, even to this day?

There is a need in America to address the issue of craftsmanship, to restore through affirmative action, the dignity and worth of the maker in society. The best inoculation against the disease of denigration is for all to have direct personal experience learning and making through the agency of our human hands. The importance of that experience is greatest for the hearts and minds of those given the power, opportunity and authority to shape the future of our planet.

We live in a culture in which the consumer is celebrated and exalted while we shatter the balance of nature, threaten with extinction the planet's diverse species, and lay the Earth to waste in our senseless hunger to devour its resources. In the interest of reversing that, welcome to the wisdom of the hands. The photo above is of Arlo and Wyatt at work making a bird house.