George H. Healey was the Macebearer at Cornell University and a professor of English in the 1960s when I was a student there. The Macebearer proceeded the President of the University at official events. As a senior, I took an upper level Shakespeare course taught by Healey and found him to be a riveting lecturer. He said one day that all of his students remembered the wrong things from his lectures and I am proof of that assertion.

Remember that those were the years of the Kennedy assassination, days of rage, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy murders, Black Panthers and Woodstock.

The professor was tenured, meaning that he was accepted by the others on the faculty as very competent in his field. He was honored in the academic community with his appointment as Macebearer. When he spoke in front of a couple of hundred students, there were no disruptions. He was thought to be the “real deal” by both students and faculty.

He described some unremembered action one day in class as “Jackassery of a high degree.” Of course, that’s the phrase I remember 50 years later.

Two recent news events would qualify for the professor’s phrase.

A couple of weeks ago there was a riot in Albuquerque outside a meeting place where Donald Trump was speaking. I say a riot as the protesters were reported to be throwing burning T-shirts and flaming plastic bottles at Trump supporters. One young woman, 22 years old and a student at the University of New Mexico, told the Associated Press she was there because Mr. Trump proposed deporting her relatives who were in the country illegally. So she was rioting to protest that someone wanted to uphold the laws of the country.

About a week ago, there was a large protest at Dartmouth College. Now, Dartmouth is one of the most prestigious universities in this country. American leaders have come from Dartmouth for centuries. There were 3,600 student signatures gathered to protest the non-award of tenure to an Asian-American woman. The basis of the protest had to do with statistics.

About 35 percent of Dartmouth’s student are politically defined as “minorities.” Only 17 percent of the faculty are minorities. Therefore, the students’ premise was that the non-awarding of tenure was a discriminatory action. My bet is that the faculty thought the candidate wasn’t of the caliber of the rest of the teaching unit.

Professor Healey would be be pleased that these two unrelated knee-jerk reactions might just qualify as “Jackassery of a high degree.” I worked with a guy who would exclaim, “What were they thinking!” with both incidents.

My point is we are again living in the days of rage. Both political conventions this summer are likely to experience out of control demonstrations. Certainly there are many problems facing the country, but we should prioritize for ourselves what order of importance they should be addressed. My belief is that each of us can make a difference. Pick out your major concern and then create a personal action plan.

My number one choice is the economy. I write about it. The world leaders have been using monetary policy to bring prosperity to the worldwide economy for nearly a decade and we don’t have anywhere near worldwide prosperity.

I have maintained for the better part of a decade that fiscal policy has to be used to fix the economic problems. I may not be correct, but the use of monetary policy hasn’t led to economic prosperity. Since there is only fiscal policy or monetary policy available, I feel reasonably certain that fiscal policy might be the better choice.

And by the way, stop complaining about the remaining presidential candidates. We had nearly two dozen choices just eight months ago and narrowed the field to two main ones as is prescribed by the political methodology which we have used in this country for decades. I am not too satisfied myself. I believe that one might be criminally liable for her disregard for national security and the other one is a very brash jerk. They were our choices. Suck it up guys and vote for your candidate in November.

This is our America. We are all hyphenated Americans. The descriptor always is the first name followed by a hyphen: Catholic-, Protestant-, Irish-, Black-, Asian Pacific Islander-, female-, LGBT-, Native-, Hispanic- but always followed by the last name: American. In the past we always dropped the first name and blended together to be just Americans and formed the greatest society ever known to mankind.

Just drop the adjectives for me, my choice is to be just an Amerian, no hyphen.