1938 Ignorant

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Stephen at "[A]mazed and [Be]mused" posted a complaint recently, that the American public is ignorant. Dangerously ignorant.

He uses as examples the way we demand antibiotics for viral colds, when we should know by now that they don't help, and the doctors give them to us. This contributes to bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics. We are happily creating killer germs. Further, when antibiotics are truly indicated, we know we should take the full course of antibiotics, the doctors are insistent that we take the full course, we know we shouldn't stop when we start to feel better. Again, stopping short of the full course leads to resistant germs. But how many times have you read of some blogger self-treating with antibiotics "left over from the last time I had this"? Otherwise reasonable people are trying to kill us.

Another of Stephen's examples is the huge number of Americans who still believe Barack Obama is Muslim, Democrats as well as Republicans. He gives the count at 25%, regardless of the amount of investigative coverage Obama has had by folks who would like to see him fail. And then there's the huge number who still believe Saddam Hussein had WMD. I'll add to this all the folks who sincerely believe that anyone who is not American is automatically stupid. These people vote, and their ignorance could kill us all.

I'll add, as further proof of the ignorance of America, the very large number of us, thousands, who actually fall for those "Nigerian Scams" every year. How can anyone alive and aware enough to use a computer NOT know about those scams?

And then there's the way we fall for every commercial, for every "new and improved" product, everything corporations tell us. Companies have to come up with stuff to sell us. But hey, we don't have to buy it! The shampoo companies discovered how stupid we were in the '70s (or so) when they discovered that they could sell us twice as much shampoo simply by putting "Rinse, repeat" on the bottle.

Now they are telling us that we need to bleach and sanitize everything in the house, or we're a bad mother and terrible housekeeper. They don't care that we'd be raising a generation of kids with no immunities. Why on earth have we accepted that?

Why do we need to have every fancy electronic device that comes along? You know all those CDs you spent a fortune on in the 80s and 90s? If business has its way, they will all become unplayable soon, and you'll have to replace your entire music collection (ka-ching!). Why do we accept being expected to upgrade (read "replace") cell phones, etc. etc., every year? God forbid you should buy anything that you aren't forced to replace long before it dies. In the meantime, what is this throw-away mentality doing to our natural resources, and landfills?

Obesity. Deadly. Howcome we don't seem to know that yet? We know how deadly fast food burgers are, and yet there are many people who never eat anything but. Thinking people were horrified when they started putting 1/4 lb. of meat in one bun. Um, the past few times I've tried to order a burger in a steak house, the smallest was 1/2 lb. of meat! People are buying those things! Why?! Because they're ignorant of the consequences. And they shouldn't be.

We never see the consequences of what we do, what we accept, what we're "sold". We bought the SUV "necessity" whole hog. Whole GAS hog. I still don't understand why people thought they HAD to have them. But we did pretty much the same thing on a larger scale 50 years ago, when we allowed freight trains to die in favor of long-haul trucking. I still don't understand how anyone could think that was better. You know those stupid Europeans? They can go from almost any address in any small city to any other address in any other small city completely by bus and train. Comfortable, fast, frequent, convenient trains, which, since they've kept the tracks up, are only getting faster. Compare to our mass transit systems. We are completely ignorant. And it's going to kill us, economically if not literally.

What is most dangerous is our complete and utter ignorance of history and geography, our disdain for any other culture but our own.

Stephen ends with: "But if the question is, Will the informed, rational people of the world one day be destroyed by events set in motion by other people’s ignorance?, the answer is You betcha!"
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