Ignorance is blissful only to the ignorant

I’m worried.

I’m worried about the future of humanity when I see some of the woeful ignorance that is expressed by our younger members. Come on, kids, it’s going to be up to you to keep this wretched planet going after the rest of us are either too old to do much, or to care much, or are dead and gone.

So, get a grip.

Currently there is a sad little video making the rounds. You may have seen it. My wife sent it to me yesterday, and Tai has it posted on her blog today, so I won’t bother posting it. The video concerns an interview question posed to a young lady who is running in the Miss Teen America competition. Her response is, at first instance, hilarious because it is so utterly ignorant to a degree that it segues into the surreal. But later, it becomes rather sad and, as a number of bloggers expressed on Tai’s responses (and I agree with them), you feel sorry for the girl. But, you feel even sorrier for the rest of us when you learn that the young female has been deemed an ‘honor student.’ That’s chilling.

But, I do feel sorry for her in that her ignorance is there for the world to see, and I feel sorry for her in that she seems so intellectually oblivious to the world around her. Good thing she’s cute because she doesn’t seem to have much else going for her.

But, she is just symptomatic of a broader malaise that seems to afflict the young more than their elders, and that is an appalling degree of unawareness about not only the world beyond their realm of I-Pods and mobile phones, but an intellectual oblivion about anything that came before the time they were “mewling and puking” I their mothers’ arms.

Wendy tells me of the young woman in her office who is, it is obvious to anybody, being fast-tracked to a managerial position, primarily because she has influential friends and family. The other day the name of a former premier of British Columbia (about 15 years ago) came up. Now this young woman, in government service at big time pay asked: Who’s that?” when the name was mentioned. “What do you mean, who’s that?” asked Wendy’s incredulous colleague. “He was premier of BC in the early 1990s.” She replied that was before her time, so it meant nothing to her.

How precious such people are to deem nothing that came before them worthy of consideration. That’s akin to a recent poll in the US that showed a large percentage of young people had no idea that Britain and the US were allies in World War Two. That was among those who had some idea what World War Two actually involved, and who were the good guys and bad guys in that conflict. Many didn’t.

Is this stuff important? You bet it is. History is a continuum and we learn from our errors of the past hopefully, despite those in the Bush administration who seem to have very faulty recall of how Vietnam played out.

Who is to blame? What is to blame? Many factors and elements, I suspect. It’s easy to blame schools and teachers, but those people have some mighty heady outside influences to counter in order to drum in some dreary facts and concepts, I guess.

But, the fact that the young lady earlier was an honor student suggests that something is remiss somewhere because she should be in a remedial class in the hopes of salvaging three or four brain cells.

“D’oh!”