I already warned you in my last column that I was going to get off the election subject. I want to talk about a few key issues I’m noticing while I still have time this semester. But today I would like to just get something off my chest. It’s a personal gripe, so excuse the following tirade.
Friends, why is it considered cool to be stupid? Why is it fashionable to be ignorant?
Why is inexperience and a lack of knowledge considered fun, or funny or just generally the preferred way to be?
Let me give some examples.
When I first moved to Bowling Green, after separating from the Marine Corps, I got a menial job. While discussing my goals with one of my managers, and how much work I would have to put forth and how much time it would take, she just shook her head. She looked at me and said: “Thank God I already got my goals out of the way.”
I asked her what she meant. She told me all she ever wanted was to get a small home and have a few kids. And she got it. She has a trailer in North Baltimore and she popped out five kids. She’s 27. And happy, I guess. Somehow.
When I am confronted with those types of stories from people, I usually can excuse my disgust with how I merely grew used to living my life. Ever since I was a child, I’ve always been adventurous. There was never a dirt hill too tall, sewer pipe too dark or mucky or closed fairground with chain link I couldn’t sneak my way over. I joined the Marine Corps purely with the desire to have an adventure. Of any kind.
After my deployment to Iraq, I had a gunnery sergeant tell me that he had to send me to Kansas City because he had to send somebody and it seemed like a good place for me to go. He apologized that it wasn’t anything special.
I was sure he was kidding. Of course Kansas City was special! I had never been there before. That’s all it takes to keep me happy in life. Show me a dark-lit path and grant me permission and encouragement to venture down it.
So, when I heard someone tell me that all they have ever wanted to do was to just graduate high school, have kids and get a trailer … friends, I can’t process that.
But that’s not the worst thing I’ve been seeing lately. That’s ultimately something I can just shrug off, because if that makes someone happy (somehow), then so be it.
What’s worse is the lightheartedness people have toward being stupid, or vapid, or vacuous or just plain ignorant. There’s a sort of pride that comes with it too.
I felt a little masochistic the other day, so I ventured onto Tumblr. I just scrolled through a bunch of pages. I found one that was supposed to be about the fun of grammar and language. I thought it would be interesting, because I consider myself an amateur linguist and enjoy anything that explores the actual fun behind language.
The first post I saw was a small paragraph about how “cough, through, thought and ought all make a different sound, but pony and bologna rhyme.” It finished off with “isn’t English weird?”
Well, yes. It is weird. If you merely glimpse at it and walk away. I saw that there were some 4000 reblogs of the meme, and realized that was just what was going on.
Four thousand people read the meme, chuckled, shared it, and then moved on with their life.
But were there any comments to describe why those words sound the way they do?
Or any enlightenment into how English had such words evolve within the language?
Nope.
People were comfortable with the lack of knowledge and proud to display the ignorance.
There was also a vine I saw recently titled “The Weirdest (sic) Thing You’ll See Today.” I accepted that challenge and clicked play. What did I see?
A crab molting. A crab shedding its old shell.
Why is that weird? Why would someone assume that would be the strangest thing I saw all day?
Oh, because people don’t know about it. And they want to let the world know they don’t know about it. I don’t really want to tell you how many views that Vine had, nor how many shares it had on Facebook.
It was a depressing amount.
Now, as usual, I am coming across as a grumpy old man. I am once again arrogantly yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
“Come on, dude,” you may say. “These are just jokes.”
Well, it may be arrogant, and I may be grumpy (so, so grumpy), but I don’t get the joke. Because I can see the harm in being passé about ignorance.
Trump, Cruz, Clinton and Sanders are only as popular as they are because people don’t realize the inanity of what these politicians preach. People refuse to read into policy and are voting for these candidates because their words merely sound right.
Because it’s just not cool to know better. Nobody deems it necessary to read into anything anymore.
We have an entire anti-vaccine movement making children sick. Because nobody wants to actually look into the actual science behind vaccines. It’s cooler, more gauche, to just accept what the flashy green social media pages tell people.
And I could go on, but I think my therapy session is just about over. Thank you for letting me rant, or at least thank you for reading the rant.
And please, help me end the culture of ignorance. Let’s make it cool to be intelligent again.
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