Some data that I heard from an American friend in the 1990s has stuck with me. The data went that the top 25 percent of high school graduates in America go to universities. The top 10 percent go on to earn M.S. or equivalent degrees and the top two percent go on to earn Ph.D. or equivalent degrees. I don't know if the data is correct. It didn't sound far from the truth.
Education has been not the exception but the practice in America for personal success in life. This America is what the late Ronald Reagan once called a "shining city upon a hill."
So, it is an easy argument to make that going to school in this America is about every family's labor of love. Those who make it to universities celebrate it and envision brighter futures in their lives. Countless get exhilarated every year that they are the first in their family to graduate from college.
One of these days, the shining city upon a hill woke up to hear yet another shocking news that four young university students were brutally murdered in a small city in Idaho.
A long while later, law enforcement officials announced that a Ph.D. student is allegedly the suspect in these brutal murders.
In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, self-actualization lies at the top of human needs. It doesn't take a lot of intuition that any student who works towards earning a Ph.D. degree has self-actualization in his or her life in sight. Ironically, it comes across at a moment's notice that his topic of research could be the road that would lead him to that self-actualization because of the disproportionate crimes that have happened in the "shining city upon a hill" in the last several years when compared to other places on planet Earth. Prevalent problems are often the sources of research visions.
I presume that the shining city upon a hill is the most visible part of planet Earth to the extraterrestrials of high above.
So, extraterrestrials, this happened on this planet, in the shining city upon a hill. One must be wondering what intuitions you may have from high above to explain simply what happened. I do not think that humans know how to explain simply what happened without leaving any question unanswered.