America - Pretend to be Smart, Pretend to be Stupid or be Left Behind

The Daily Cardinal is the first newspaper I've read that publishes an article that has no correlation to news, and usually no correlation to reality. I stopped reading it sometime at the beginning of last semester. Just recently I've been able to stop clicking on the interesting article titles on my news feeds. The problem today is that the New York Times published an article that was so strikingly similar to one of these Page Two articles that I was able to find the one in the Daily Cardinal, published 2 months ago. To my surprise, the New York Times article was the most e-mailed article at the time.

Read through either of them and you'll find people who not only judge others by the books they read, but also by the books they say they read. Judge me, I actually read these articles. I was almost angry as both talked about appearing too dumb talking about "The Art and Zen of Motorcycle Repair," or appearing snobby talking about authors who I've never heard of. It's an exercise in dumbing down and being fake.

Enter the next New York Times Op-Ed article: ‘With a Few More Brains ...’

Politicians generally act smarter than they really are in third world countries while politicians here generally act "closer to the average American." After reading these articles, I'd like to look for friends by asking something like, "do you know what DNA is and how it affects you?" Apparently I'd sort out 2/3rds of the population. No, no, somethings wrong here. Why am I talking about ostracizing people simply because they don't know about something very well. No wonder politicians have to look dumbed down, if they don't, people won't trust them to make representative decisions.

I believe that many people don't bother to educate themselves about more complex things because they feel out of their league. Almost as if they don't believe that they could understand something. Try to tell someone you're a computer engineer and chances are they have a mental image of you with a train conductors hat sitting behind a computer. Education policies today aren't helping much either. Schools focusing on standardized tests fail to ensure ground level understanding and instead strive for basic knowledge of too many topics for the amount of time and funding given. Students come away from school feeling as if knowledge is out of their reach, when in reality they've been brought up in a rushed atmosphere that doesn't cultivate understanding.

This same atmosphere drives a strong apathy for politics and activism in general. Complaining about state and/or city politics? Unheard of! Most of my friends didn't even realize there was an election today. Back in Kenosha the Mayors stepping down and my alderman's stepping down. A few weeks after the primary my brother asked me who was replacing them. That's right, he voted but didn't know that it was just a primary. Supreme Court Justice anyone? No, the answer isn't yes. Whoever is elected will serve for a very long time, shaping our state. Veto Pen anyone? It's getting voted on this election too.