America: An Idiocracy in the Making

Does anybody know who came up with the "Got Milk?" ad campaign? I'd like to hit him with a stick. Whoever it was appears to be one step shy of functionally illiterate, and somehow the rest of the world has caught the stupid bug. Now H & R Block has this campaign featuring happy tax refund recipients proudly proclaiming "I got people!" Are they trying to make the point that some people are just too dim to do their own taxes? I've seen bumper stickers asking "Got Jesus?", "Got W?", and "Got Twins?" which makes me wish I still had one of my favorite stickers: it read, "Stupid People Shouldn't Breed".

News flash, people: We have milk. Some of us have Jesus, some of us have twins, and unfortunately, we have W. We don't "got" any of them. "Got" is past tense. I'm not picking on ordinary people and the casual vernacular most of us use. I'm picking on the people with their expensive college degrees, who get paid lots of money to bring a product into public view and don't appear to have beyond a second-grade grasp of grammar.

Are we just a bunch of idiots in this country? It's starting to look that way, though I know it isn't true.

My daughter had a teacher's assistant who told her that "a lot", when referring to quantity, is one word. It's a mistake many people make, but shouldn't a teacher know better? She also insisted to my daughter that "ladder", as in the thing you climb to get your cat out of a tree, is spelled "latter". Those are just the two examples that come to mind right away; my daughter came home with this kind of bad information at least twice a month. The really sad thing is, she was only in sixth grade, and the majority of the time she knew that the teacher's assistant was telling her the wrong thing.

There's a day care in my area called Kids Kountry Klubhouse. What? Alliteration is cute, I guess, but if you can't spell simple words like "country" and "clubhouse", I really don't think you need to be taking care of children. Can you read the directions on a bottle of Children's Tylenol? What if a child asks you how to spell a word? Kids are expected to misspell things. I expect a little more out of adults.

And just for the record, people don't go missing. They disappear, they vanish, but they don't go missing. Someone can go away and therefore be missing, but he cannot go missing. Quit saying it! News isn't supposed to be trendy, it's supposed to be factual. Enough with the stupid catch phrases.

Like I said before, the idiocy seems to be contagious, and it's bringing ignorance with it. The grammar and spelling things are minor annoyances, but I'm really disturbed by the way people seem to have lost the ability to think.

We're bombarded on TV and in print for ads for drugs; new ones almost every day, it seems. We're sitting there trying to watch CSI and during a commercial break, Mr. SoothingSmartVoice tells us Hey! Ask your doctor about this new drug! You might need it! Half the time the ads don't even tell you what the drug is for, and yet there are people who listen to the commercials and ask their doctors; even worse is the fact that there are unethical doctors who will subscribe the stuff whether it's warranted or not. And what about those weight loss commercials? If it took you ten years to gain those extra hundred pounds, do you really think you can lose it in a few months? And if you did, would it be safe? People are allowing their children to be prescribed anti-psychotics-young children, on anti-psychotic drugs, as young as four and five years old-because they're unruly and can't sit still. Take five minutes and think...an unruly five-year-old is a normal five-year-old.

The anti-thinking phenomenon has spread into the world of politics as well. OK, it's been there for a while, but it's spread into the minds of people who have stopped thinking for themselves and chosen their political beliefs based on...I don't know what...ignorance? Complacency? Fear? Cowardice? Or all of the above, perhaps. The war on Iraq has brought out misguided ideas of patriotism in people who, for reasons I can't figure out, don't take the time to think about what it means. I am considered by many people to be unpatriotic, because I don't support what the president is doing. Because I don't change my own morals and standards of behavior, don't twist my thinking to be able to accept the actions of one man, I am unpatriotic, un-American, a traitor. I am accused of being against our troops because I think George W Bush is a bad man. Nothing could be further from the truth. I'm not here to argue politics; if you truly believe that what Bush is doing is right, then by all means show your support. The fact that you can have your opinion and I mine is one of the reasons that I do love this country. Patriotism is not about blanket acceptance of the man in charge, just because he is the man in charge. People tend to forget, while they're talking about adhering to the values of our forefathers, that this country was founded by dissidents in search of religious and personal freedom. It was founded by a group of brave people who stood up to the way things were and fought to change them. Patriotism is about loving your country and wanting it to be the best it can be. If you're a parent and your child is making dangerous mistakes in his life, you don't let him keep going because you love him and that's the way things are. You continue to love him, and try to change his behavior for the better. Things not pushed to be better grow stagnant, or get worse. And it is because I support our soldiers that I want them to come home to their families safely. My cousin is in Iraq; so is the younger brother of a very good friend. These are people that I care about, and every soldier in Iraq has people at home who care about him or her. I believe they deserve far better than what they've been given by the administration they work for.

The United States of America isn't a nation of idiots-but we're headed that way fast if people don't wake up and start to think once in a while.