Should Ignorance Be a Major; There Are So Many Educated In It!

wHAT KIND OF A LESSON DO WE SEND TO OUR KIDS...


IT IS BAD ENOUGH WHEN OUR KIDS CAN'T RECOGNIZE THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR WORLD WAR TWO? BUT WHEN ADULTS STILL DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED IN VIETNAM, HOW SURPRISED SHOULD WE BE THAT WE HAD A PRESIDENT DECLARE WAR WHO DIDN'T KNOW A SHIA' FROM A SUNNI, WHO DIDN'T KNOW THAT UNDER SADDAM, IRAQ WAS MOSTLY SECULAR, THAT BELIEVED IN HIS CONVERSATIONS WITH CHENEY AND GOD, THAT THEY WOULD CLING TO DEMOCRACY IF OFFERED....

Well, if the president is such a retard, maybe a lack of education and involvement is all you really need to get by....

Is that the message? And should it frighten us?...

WHY ARE WE SO PROUD TO BE JOCKS AND SO CONTENT TO BE IGNORANT?

WHY DO MANY OF US WEAR IGNORANCE LIKE A BADGE OF HONOR?

WHY DO WE HAVE SO LITTLE RESPECT FOR HISTORY?

When I first started watching the Late Night NBC Show and heard Jay talking to college graduates and asking them questions that they couldn't even begin to answer that I would think would be appropriate for third graders, my immediate reaction was that it was a set up.

No, cut it out, Jay.

Americans can't be that dumb!....They have to know that there is only one moon in our sky...(college astronomy graduate)....They have to be able to locate Florida on a map....they have to know where China is on a globe....

They're just pulling our collective legs.

Oh, I wish it were so...

But now I'm not so sure. You see, I am a Vet who served in the Nam era, and I am always coming up across bad information and attitudes based on ignorance from people who you would think of as smart. "Why didn't we use nuclear weapons?" is one of them...
"We could have creamed them if the government stayed out" is another...
All indicative of people who don't know the first thing about what happened in this far away land that took the lives of 50,000 of our best and brightest. (Have all the best and brightest been killed off??? (A question for another day)....

Well, there's only so much you can chalk up to not having the facts...

I thought I would do better with college seniors getting ready to graduate.

I was teaching them when the Iraq war broke out.

I later asked individual students what they thought about Iraq.

Most didn't seem to think much about anything, especially Iraq....

Most probably couldn't find Iraq on a map.

Most also tended to believe what the president said. I was shocked. I had come from a generation that questioned everything. And was mostly liberally disposed.

But we didn't make giant assumptions and we all thought we were pretty well informed.

When Cuba's fight for freedom and independence, several of my crowd went down to stay with Castro. I was living in Miami at the time and everybody knew what was happening.

Clearly, this is a more conservative generation than I'm familiar and where I live now is mostly Republican.... so I am not sure how representative things are and whether anyone can safely make judgements.

in New York, there was still a liberal bent to the crowd and a million different opinions and the God saving grace of diversity....

I know lot's of young people, however, and in our polite conversations, it never seems to get beyond lawns, cars, brands, babies, jobs.... and I am really starting to get worried about this generation that we parents coddled and protected. Perhaps we protected them too much it occurs to me...

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon