Barack Obama is the luckiest dude on the planet….
Um, Barack so what am I supposed make of the UN (non)move? When I sit back and ponder the difference in my opinion of the BHO domestic agenda and my opinion of BHO foreign policy and I start to wonder who it is that I like BHO or HRC am I supposed to take the UN (non)move as a, “I like HRC?”
Watching the interview I thought of something that made me run to the google machine part of the google machine. (no, it’s not a typo – for once!) I googled up a map of the Middle East so I could see a map of all of the countries bordering Jordan.
I know there are gaps in my American public school education. After all, there are plenty of gaps in the American public school educational system. Even with that in mind I was taken aback at how wrong my ideas of what countries even comprise and border that area of the globe were.
Man, in retrospect maybe the problem with the USAToday wasn’t that it introduced Journalism Light, maybe it was the it was a precursor to gradual the general dumbing down of how the government and media speak to the people at large that has accompanied the trend towards increasingly poorly funded and piss poorly delivered education and the rise of it being socially acceptable to disparage the acceptance of physical science as truth.
I mean seriously? I got distracted looking for a few of the former USSR Republics because they weren’t where I thought they were either.
I’m not sure what body of water I thought Tunusia, Algeria and Libya were on. I like pirates so I know they all had big pirate ports back in the day that were always warring with pirate ports on the other side of the Great Crusades divide but I know I wouldn’t have guessed they were on the Mediterranean. I guess that makes more sense than a bunch of sailors who thought the world was flat spending generation after generation after generation sailing back and in the big bad Atlantic in bad weather. The Med was probably more than stormy enough to keep them on their toes. Huh. Amazing that they were able to build boats to withstand all that actually. In pretty much any age, technology is cool.
It just seems crazy that I was brought up in a country founded by Europeans and I didn’t learn more about the history and geography of Europe in school. I guess -to be fair- I didn’t learn much of anything about the history of the people who lived in this country before the Europeans got here either. Which is rather odd actually, because I know school children in Europe learn at least a version of the history of the people who inhabited the land before the people who formed their country arrived. Hmmm.
I know it didn’t use to be that way. (The American Public Education System not the systematic white-washing of the culture and history of Native Americans, stay with me!) I have old text books and reference books from the first half of the twentieth century and they are much more detailed and informative than anything I ever saw in school. When did we start, as a society, thinking that we are too stupid to be able to handle facts? When and why did we start treating ourselves as children? “Oh, keep it simple, they won’t be able to handle that…”
Chicken and the egg, when did we stop sharing complicated detailed information and teaching our children to use their cognitive skills to process it? I don’t think the American people are stupid but we sure as hell are a generally uninformed group. Sigh…
Oooooh, so that’s were all of those soldiers from Chad during in Libya during the anti-Gaddafi uprising. Chad’s right next door. Never bothered to put that fact together before. No idea where I thought Chad was but it wasn’t there. Hmmm. The fruits of my public school education. There is so much I don’t know and I bombarded with media that thinks I know less than I do so it is really hard to learn anything without specially looking it up. “To the google machine!”
Sigh…
Great interview though.
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