Emergency

This is the scariest thing I've read in a while. If you read my blog from the top down, you'll later come to a long rant about stupid people in America. Before you dismiss it, you need to read this report from the Associated Press.

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes "too far" in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.

[....]

"These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous," said Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sponsored the $1 million study. "Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation's future."

Is that not frightening? Only half of the students believe in a free press? Oh - my - fucking - god.

America is smack dab in the middle of an age of anti-intellectualism. The prevailing attitude is that it's okay to be ignorant. It's not. The are many things about people that are irrelevant; their age, their skin color, their sex, their sexual orientation, their physical appearance, their disabilities. We cannot be tolerant of the drain in educational standards.

Please, do me a favor. Insist that schools emphasize the free and open nature of our Constitution and way of life.

Then again, if you're reading my blog, if you're out on the internet and not just surfing porn, you probably don't have kids like those anyway.

One thing to take consolation in. The rest of the world is not headed in this same direction. Most European countries, as far as I can tell, are quite enlightened. I would seriously consider moving. I've been to London. I could live there.