Being Deliberately Ignorant
It takes work not to know what is going on in the world these days. Even if you watch comedic shows like “The Daily Show” you will actually get some nuggets of news that are then skewered and made fun of (which is as it should be, in my opinion). There are newspapers everywhere and you can find them online. There is satellite television with so many 24-hour news channels that they now have to sort of make up news stories just to find a way to fill those 24 hours. You can even download news and information to your PDA or cell phone. Yet, there are people I know who choose to be deliberately ignorant.
This may go part and parcel to those people who choose to have a sunny disposition and hide their head int he sand. However, it amazes me that there are people out there who deliberately choose not to know or care about what is going on the world. I have heard a variety of excuses. One of the more popular is that there is nothing they can do about it so why bother dealing with it or worrying about it. My argument is that so many people have had that same attitude that it is the very reason the world is in the state it is in. If more people were actively involved in things maybe the world wouldn’t be such a mess.
The other argument seems to be that people are just not interested. They don’t want to watch the news just because it is the news and it’s not as interesting as that show slowly sucking the life and intelligence out of the world “American Idol.” These people are the ones who truly frost my britches. They not only don’t care what is going on today, they have no desire to know what happened in the past. You ask these people about very well known events that occurred even back in the 80s and they stare at you blankly, like some kind of transistor has blown near the back of their brains.
Unfortunately, I feel that the current administration that is running this country is FULL of deliberately ignorant people. I almost feel sorry for poor Georgie-boy. These days when I see a picture of George W. I see a lost little boy in a store looking for his mommy. You ever see a litte kid like that? That moment when they realize they are all by themselves and just before they burst into tears and bawl loud enough to break the fluorescent bulbs above them is what I see on George’s face these days.
See, recently “Scooter” Libby (wasn’t he a Muppet?) said he heard from Dick Cheney that he was authorized to leak classified information. It is my bet Dick Cheney authorized it and just said the President was aware of it. I can’t shake the feeling that Dick Cheney is really in charge. This has been said before but it just looks more and more like it to me. It’s like Dickie always wanted to be President but everyone knew his twisted mug would scare children to death and the fact he was more machine than man would not play well in the polls. So, he called in a favor to George Bush, Sr. and he suggested his idiot son would make a good puppet.
Anyway, Dick Cheney only watches Fox News. We know this because of a recent leak of a “rider” that says what must be in his hotel room when he arrives anyplace for an appearance. Riders are what rock stars send and demand on their dressing rooms when they do a concert. You know, they demand all of the brown M&Ms be removed from their bowl of candy, that kind of thing. Well Dickie demands that all of his TVs be tuned to Fox News.
Fox News claims to be “fair and balanced.” Yeah, right. Fox News is so pro-administration that they would play the national anthem and pictures of flowers blooming and children playing behind a faded image of Ol’ Glory waving majestically in the breeze while nuclear missiles were raining down on Washington D.C. and New York.
Therefore the man who is really running things (and running them into the ground I might add) is choosing to be deliberately ignorant. No wonder he felt he could say things were in the last throws of the insurgency. He probably actually believed that because the news and information he chooses to view and read tell him that this is the case.
People like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and their corresponding companions on the other side of the bench fall into the same category. I think going too far either way is bad and it takes a lot of work to truly try and be fair and balanced in your thinking. Once again, this is more work than most people are willing to put in.
However, they are willing to put in the work needed to avoid the news they don’t want to see. Without knowing history, we are doomed to repeat it. Without knowing what is going on you can do nothing to stop the mess you ultimately find yourself in. It is the deliberately ignorant that need to be stopped because they feed into people like G.W, reverend Phelps and Oprah.
Once again, I beg of you, please, just think. Think. Think. Think. And no matter what anyone says, myself included, be cynical of all of it.
