Lots of people have made up their minds about the candidate that they are going to select come November.  Well, sometimes, the only way to calm down my 20-month-old grandson is to play a video featuring a dozen versions of the children’s song, “The Wheels on the Bus.”

Truthfully, between the conventions and ongoing international carnage, we need to make sure that we check the lug nuts on the wheels of our own buses before we make our final decisions. Consequently, the topic that I would like to pursue here is hopefulness, and the art and science of rational thinking.

I’m not going to write about Dallas, Baton Rouge, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Munich, Orlando, or Minnesota. I have no desire to readdress the wars in Syrian or Afghanistan.  There will be no playing of the blame game on either party because, from my perspective, the wheels of both parties’ buses have been off more than once in this campaign. It’s been disagreeable, disgusting, and disconcerting.

My theme here is about something that one of my college professors spent an entire semester professing.  We, as human beings, are no longer being taught to actually think anymore.  Let me clarify this a little.  We are not given the tools or the classes in rational, scientific method analytics to allow us to make sense of life. We spend our days consuming Pablum.

For the vast majority of us, the primary extent of our day-to-day existence is based almost purely on emotions.  Logic hardly ever enters the equation. We are stimulus-response creatures that are mostly driven by the amygdala in our brain, and that almost always leads us into places that are not good for anyone.

We tend to focus on the mundane, the negative, the petty, the hideous, and the horrible, and that little thumb-sized amygdala gleefully sends fear, hatred, anger and paranoia throughout our brains. We mentally manipulate ourselves every day.

Much of the trouble that we are experiencing is coming from a worldwide lack of education. That, and our continued wars over whose God is better, contribute to producing a lack of rational hope. We end up living in a “whack a mole” continuum of crisis, anger, worry and warfare.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not just pushing IQ here, I’m talking about EQ (emotional intelligence) as well. We all know very smart people who have the emotional capacity of a third-grade schoolyard bully, and some not-so-smart folks who have beautiful insights into the meaning of life.

As a capitalistic society, we tend to elevate and sometimes worship people who have worked their way to the top of the food chain.  Even through many have done it through ruthless exploitation, their wealth seems to elevate them to a God-like status of perceived genius among the masses.

When we look at the Bronze Age, the era where today’s terrorists live emotionally and intellectually, we can easily see how stupid mankind is capable of being. So, the question becomes “How do we protect ourselves from stupid?”

The anger that we see in today’s culture may be well deserved, but the solutions are not simply one person solutions. Unwinding corrupt practices can only occur if we can get to the root of the WIFM equation (What’s in it for me?) It requires finding out who the puppeteer is, and what indeed is in it for him?

If this seemed slanted toward one candidate or the other, I apologize. It is my sincere desire to encourage all of us to try to make a positive difference in our own and other peoples’ lives.   I’m just asking that we think about it and not vote with our amygdala. I’m hoping that our better selves take a few minutes to really contemplate the words that are being thrown around because some of them are deadly.

Several members of my family are not fond of snakes. Let me clarify by saying that several members of my family are terrified of snakes. If a snake is within a mile of them, they completely fall apart. They make distress sounds reminiscent of scenes from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

Although they realize that this anxiety is over the top, they are still frozen in trembling, irrational panic over something that, for the most part, can’t hurt them.

Of course I’m not talking about killer snakes. They frighten me, too, and I certainly understand the fear of something that could end your life prematurely. It’s the other brand of snakes, black and garter, or garden, or gardener snakes.

These critters are good for balancing nature, and they eat deer ticks, or almost any other living thing that they are capable of consuming: slugs, earthworms, leeches, lizards, amphibians (including frog eggs), ants, crickets, rodents and minnows.

When I Googled phobia, I found nearly 500 phobias listed. For example, we’ve all heard of fear of spiders, Arachnophobia, and some members of my immediate family are concerned with heights, but how about Acerophobia, the fear of sourness?

That one took me back to some of my middle school teachers who had very sour dispositions. “Francis, did you finish your report on Medieval European Confrontations?” “No, ma’am, not yet,” I’d reply. “Well, if you don’t finish it by tomorrow, you will never graduate from middle school, never get out of high school, and you will be a failure for your entire life,” she’d say. Boom. Acerophobia.

During the past several years, I’ve developed another disquieting concern, Aeronausiphobia – the fear of vomiting secondary to airsickness. That one evolved from a flight in a private plane. As we flew through the clouds, I sat in the back of my then chairman’s beautiful airplane throwing up things that I’d eaten in first grade. This wasn’t a short run sickness either. It went on for hours. As we landed, he came through the cabin to exit, looked at me and said, “Fly home commercial.”

A former business acquaintance once told me that one of the primary reasons that prisons are built in rural areas is that the vast majority of the prisoners are from urban areas, and that they suffer from Agrizoophobia – the fear of wild animals. It seemed funny to me that these hardened gang bangers were terrified of being confronted by an angry opossum or a rabid squirrel, but, hey, I’m afraid of barfing in a plane.

Several of us have developed a new phobia, Anglophobia – fear of England. After the Brexit vote, it became clear that some of the things that encouraged 52 percent of British citizens to vote to exit the European Union may also be driving the elections in the United States. If there’s one thing that we older folks have learned, it’s to be afraid. Be very afraid.

Recently, one of my children decided to raise chickens. The rooster is a very aggressive attack animal, and from that perspective, at least a few of the kids have developed Alektorophobia – the fear of chickens, or at least the fear of one big chicken.

We had a dog once that developed Arachibutyrophobia – the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth. My Italian grandmother had Astrapophobia, the fear of thunder and lightning. She’d make me sit on the cellar steps with her and pray the rosary during storms.

I’ve personally understood Automatonophobia – fear of ventriloquist’s dummies, but only because I’ve known so many of them personally. In my case they were actually human dummies, and clearly someone with their hand in their back (or somewhere) was making their mouths move. Actually, that phobia might better have fit under the category of Proctophobia, the fear of buttheads.

My very favorite phobia, however, is Phobophobia – fear of phobias. I’m sooo scared of being scared.