15th Feb 2008
getting our facts straight
Why we believe Americans are Stupid
Just saw this video on YouTube (can you tell it’s Friday?) and while it made me laugh, it also made me shudder. The people who didn’t know what religion a Buddhist monk is. Those who thought we should invade France. The fact that if Australia was labeled Iraq or North Korea, people believed it. And those who didn’t know what or who was the Axis of Evil.
It goes back to a conversation I was having with my READ102 students yesterday. We are taught things (Columbus discovered America, Rosa Parks was just tired and needed to sit down) that must be questioned. There were many people living in America — Columbus just found it. Rosa Parks’ decision to sit down was carefully orchestrated through the local chapter of the NAACP. On the other hand, there are things we absolutely need to know — including the location of foreign countries and our relationship to them. We are waging wars in countries most people can’t find on a map. We have lost thousands of American lives and uncountable Iraqi and Afghani people.
Go home and study a map if you need to (I do, I can never get eastern Europe quite right) and start asking questions before we, as a country, commit to another few years of war and loss. It will take all of us to turn things around and we can’t do it if we don’t even know what our leaders are talking about.
And, since it’s Friday, here’s the most horrific stupid video I found — Kellie Pickler on “Are You Smarter than a Fourth Grader?”
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