U.S. military personnel use their hands to shield themselves from Erie’s detonation flash.

Can you imagine anything more futile? Or more like the proverbial ostrich?

Victor Frankenstein’s primary crime was not the creation of a living entity from lifeless elements… but his failure to take responsibility for it. Time and again he had opportunities to “parent,” to be empathetic, admit his culpability… to do the right thing. Instead, he was paralyzed by guilt, fears of what people would think of him and his relentless whininess.

We live in a world of atomic weaponry, leaders who are thugs and bullies, plastic garbage patches three times the size of France, guns in the hands of attention-starved boys, climate change deniers, racism, poverty and people who’d build walls instead of helping those who are different.

Shelley’s novel asks us to remember that it was the incapacity to take responsibility that destroyed Frankenstein… his head-burying failure to act.