Are We THAT Dumb?

There are sad facts about our country that are just inexcusable in today's world, facts that must be dealt with before we can ever hope to truly overcome the forces that have been working to tear our country apart.

Did you know that in the last fifteen years, as much as 20% of our country could not name the President of the United States? This still continues today, particularly in remote areas of our nation.

A newer study has found that 20% of Americans also believe that the sun revolves around the Earth, a belief that can only be propogated with a complete lack of any critical reasoning and poor education.

In an older article in the New York Times that I stumbled across today on Digg, well, I'd like to say that I was surprised, but in light of Dick Cheney's 9% approval rating, Bush's 28%, and Congress' equally dismal 28%, it does make sense to discover that people don't even know why they continue to approve. It is prudent to note here that the article only lightly touches on the political spectrum of today, and doesn't even mention Bush by name.

The overall point of the article is that the democracy of our country is threatened, often times by orders of magnitude more by our own ignorance than by external threats, including terrorism, communism, fascism, and really any other threat you can imagine. Including bears.

Again, I'm forced to ask the country: Are we THAT dumb?

What happened to the great nation that was destined to lead the world into the future? Somewhere along the way, our country got hijacked by fear-mongers and those who would prefer to prey upon ignorance by appealing to the most basic instincts of humans, instead of the reasoned debate our nation was built upon.

Categorically speaking, one could argue that the nation's populace has grown in collective intelligence by leaps and bounds since its founding, and yet our country is in ever more danger from its own ignorance. Perhaps this has to do with the changing face of the political landscape, and how politics has become much more about the game, the game of winning, than it has about the original cause, that of the greater good.

I mourn the loss of our nation's collective intelligence, and worse, the will to battle it with knowledge and fact.