March for Science? Isn’t that an oxymoron?

You can march for peace, march for a candidate or march for the exercise, but marching for science is like marching for gravity. Science is. Science is a systematic study of stuff. Marching doesn’t change anything, doesn’t accomplish anything.

And it was just a bit ironic when the AP story on the various marches for science quoted an Earth Day founder as saying the event in Washington was “magical.”

It was also a bit odd that the headline on the story and a cutline used the phrase “march for science,” but the story never did.

Maybe the label was just shortened, because the real purpose seemed to the summed up by one self-identified “scientist,” who was quoted as saying:

“Most people don’t know how much funding for the sciences supports them in their lives every day. Every medical breakthrough, their food, clothing, our cellphones, our computers, all that is science-based. … So if we stop funding scientific discoveries now, in 10 years, whatever we might have had won’t be; we just won’t have it.”

So, it was really a march for science handouts from taxpayers. Never mind that vast majority of scientific breakthroughs throughout history were privately funded.

For a change, President Trump’s comment on the occasion actually made sense. His statement said that “rigorous science depends not on ideology, but on a spirit of honest inquiry and robust debate.”

Settled science. Now there’s another oxymoron.