Like a Child

For those of you cool cats who have had the privilege of meeting my family first hand:

There is hope for my sibs. Here's the proof...this is a poem my sis wrote earlier this year for an assignment in her 8th grade language arts class. The assignment being, "write to Anne Frank telling her how the world is today..."

Dear Anne,
I wish I could show you
New York City
with car and people
always moving
always having something better to do
But
I wouldn't want you to
look past the cities
to the world of violence beyond
to people killing and children starving
to the crying the world tries to cover up
And
I wish that people would
look past their busyness and comfortbility
and learn to take the time to
love and care
not to judge but to help with a willing heart
those who need it
I wish
I didn't have to write this poem
to tell you that the world
is not better than when you left it
I wish I could tell you I was lying or just joking
but I can't
for the world is not crying tears of joy
but of the realization
that we have lost the grasp on what is good
and what our priorities should be
I wish I could tell you we are better then the
Nazis
but we too have no reason for our hatred
for we have become more intent and passionate
on our hatred then on our love
for the people we live with
I wish I could tell you we feel guilty
but we take only pride
by thinking we've made the world a better place
by what we've done
And I wish that if this guilt finally comes
that God would take pity and hand us the rope
of equality
that has drifted so far away
and allow us to take hold with all our might
and never
let
go

She's gonna turn out alright after all, don't you think?
(I enjoy being the proud sister)

Are YOU smarter?

There's just something about a snow day that makes me want to write. I wonder if snow days do that to other people. To be honest, today's not even a true snow day because classes were only canceled until 11 a.m. Apparently it's all the same in my mind because today as I thought of all the productive options I could pursue I disregarded each and instead decided it was time to create a blog. Typical.

Since I did not have my morning class I prepared a cup of hot green tea and flipped on the Today show. Before the commercial break smiley Matt and Meredith gave the promo for the next segment...Is America getting dumber? plugging a couple new book by some unrecognizable authors. Intrigued, I stayed tuned for the segment.

It was introduced by a series of clips put together by the Today show that included Miss South Carolina's beauty pageant answer, Kelly Pickler on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?, and Jessica Simpson. In the few short minutes of the interview it was debated whether technology (TV and Internet mainly) which originally was viewed as a great tool to access unlimited amounts of information is actually turning against us and making us more dumb. One of the authors insisted that reality TV is the root of Americans losing brain cells. But can we really blame reality TV? I don't think that's fair. I'm not saying it's making us smarter by any means because let's be honest, the stuff is junk, but it's definitely not the root of the problem. The root in my opinion...arrogance.

I once had an argument with my mother in which she argued that people today are not as smart as our founding fathers. She came to this conclusion because she was having trouble reading and understanding some piece written by Thomas Jefferson. I could not agree with her (surprise, surprise). For one she was having trouble because people talked different back then. They used different phrases, different words, and even different spellings in some cases. For another, how could we have advanced thus far scientifically and technologically if people were getting increasingly more dumb? Every day were are being exposed to more and more information and discovering more and more new things about the world we live in.

x amount of information = x amount of knowledge

The problem is some information (aka reality TV, celebrity news, etc) produces knowledge that is not meaningful and ultimately distracts us from accessing meaningful knowledge. In the Today show segment they showed a picture of Bill Gates to a person on the street and asked if they knew who it was. "Nope." Then the next picture was of Harry Potter and right away they answered, "Oh, that's Harry Potter." So why do some choose to surround themselves with useless information? Arrogance.

arrogance: offensive display of superiority or self-importance; overbearing pride

For some reason Americans, arguably more than the rest of the world, believe they are superior. Therefore accessing information to acquire knowledge about the world, other cultures, beliefs, values, and languages comes second to the latest scoop on Britney's downward spiral. Most of us have lost that inquisitive, curious nature, giving way to lazy acceptance of all information thrown in our face.

Nope, I refuse to believe we are any less knowledgeable than our founding fathers. Rather most have just channeled their knowledge into meaningless areas.

And to sum up all this knowledge talk I think it's appropriate to refer to an old proverb:

He who gets wisdom loves his own soul;
he would cherishes understanding prospers. -Proverbs 19:8