Around three quarters of Americans and a much smaller number of Europeans drink fluoridated water. This practice is intended to strengthen growing children's teeth, a benefit that can last a lifetime, and is known by some as mass medication. How do you feel for instance about including vitamin D in the nation's milk, or adding trace amounts of iodine to the nation's table salt? These practices plus fluoridation of public drinking water are used today across the country, and are forms of accepted so-called mass medication used across the world with an enormous public health benefit.

We do this because the results, impacts, and risks are known, and the benefits are plain to a reasonable person. Toxicology and other studies are widely accepted through independent international duplication of risks and results.

However, the role science can and should play in the argument is being minimized these days more and more by people who's feelings have been hurt, presumably by scientific facts at some time in their past.

Perhaps you, dear reader are not aware of separated identical twin studies regarding the incidence of homosexuality in a population. You may blow off advances in cancer research based on loads of new evolution science because you deny the science of evolution. Maybe you are able to find lethal poisons in conventional medically advised vaccines.

If so, I am speaking to you. I hope you understand that most of us alive on this planet at this time, are only here because of science and invention - engineering if you wish. Without the design and manufacture of goods, we would be a few million struggling families scattered across the globe. Instead we thrive.

This is our recognized gift as homo sapiens. After all, we are the only species of humans able to survive the last ice age. We out survived our brothers, the Neanderthals, the ones who were cold-weather adapted. Also, they, according to science mind-you, were apparently less good at tool making, and the construction of clothing, plus, they had no belief in a God. They were simply slower to adapt to all sorts of violently changing conditions, in spite of covering a huge portion of the globe compared with us sapiens.

But our advantage as a species may be reaching its practical limit lately, thanks to a handful of loud, obnoxious, and deliberately ignorant homo sapiens on the far right.