The Acceptance of Ignorance

You've come a long way baby; a very successful ad campaign touting the "liberating" aspects of smoking to the fight for women's' right. Phillip Morris took a very real struggle for health and bent the words to their own advantages, an Orwellian approach, if you will, targeting the empowering aspects of freedom and extending the same to describing how cool it was that women had their own "Marlboro Man' moment.

Well it seems that we as a populace have taken those Orwellian distortions and applied them to so many aspects of our lives that we find it difficult to sort through the noise and find truly objective information; so many in this country are taking great pride in parading their ignorance and demanding that we accept their version of truth in spite of all the credible evidence to the contrary. This nation of immigrants is now painting immigration as the greatest evil ever.  Television pundits are being paid every day to spread misinformation on the airways without being called to account. Education is being portrayed as an indoctrination tool the 'social secular elites' are using to inculcate the children of this nation to who knows what end.

When the a Ptolomeic view of the universe was being challenged by the Copernican view (they were both wrong, but Copernicus was less wrong), the learned men of the times were gnashing their teeth and rending garments since it had to be obvious that G-d created the Earth ergo the universe was logically thought to revolve around The Earth as opposed to any other point of view. The Church, perhaps feeling its sway over public opinion being threatened did all it could to dissuade anyone of this notion. Galileo, perhaps picking up where Copernicus left off, added fuel to the fire. We were not all that, as a matter of fact, compared to the rest of the universe, we were fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

What we are seeing today is the willful acceptance of ignorance; while we can state with some certainty that access to information was a bit limited in the past, we know that any kid with library and internet resources at the ready can almost immediately debunk any revisionist interpretation of history. We, as a society, have grown accustomed to the big lie; the moon landing was a hoax, the holocaust never happened and that the WWF is a true sporting event. We allow demagogues to twist and bend opinions into faux-facts, and when challenged, these same demagogues blame the media or other such group as being 'elite' and out of touch with the American psyche.

The notion that teaching history should remain in the realm of opinion, as demonstrated in the recent actions taken by the Tucson United School District and the elimination of Chicano\Latino studies in AZU, is a dangerous first step in the scrubbing of the past.

So here we are; the world is six thousand years old and flat, dinosaurs ran around with Adam and Eve, the past is being viewed with rose colored gauze and we can hardly agree on basic facts. Yet, this is where this country and society are headed; in a race to the bottom and we're leading the pack.

As Vonnegut used to say..."and there it goes"