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It's always been true that it's easy to be dumb. You just have to ignore things. It takes work and bother to pick up a book, a magazine, or anything in print and read it. It takes energy to care enough to watch the news.
It seems that this country is becoming dumber and having fun doing it. I don't see any Democrats who agree. This seems to be a Republican thing to do.
Recent developments confirm this. Fear is overtaking inquiry. New information has become too scary to consider. So we don't. Ignorance, heaven help us, really is bliss.
It is also whistling past graveyards. Learning new things isn't necessarily a nod toward one political party over another, but when the other one makes it clear that it's apparently so, it represents a line in the sand that it doesn't want people to get smarter. Just listen to us, they say. Ignore those other people, like scientists and sociologists and researchers. They're "woke." That's goofy.
It's also very damaging to human development. Because real learning, as the historian Daniel Boorstin once wrote, is finding out what you didn't even know you didn't know--to have your previous assumptions questioned because you embraced the possibilities that they might have been based on obsolete, erroneous or intentionally misleading information.
Thinking about that becomes uncomfortable and unsettling. There is an inertia to humans that fights this automatically, that wants to leave things be. But that belies the essence of inquiry--which is part of the essence of humanity: the acceptance that, while we will never know everything, needing to continue down that path can make things better.
It can also overwhelm us with worry. Artificial Intelligence can scare the hell out of us. It can thwart any coherent meaning of what constitutes reality. It has the potential to revise education irrevocably--and to ruin it.
The inclination is to withdraw into a sheltered state where information is endlessly familiar. But that's the easy way out.
Ron DeSantis is advocating for the easy way out. Discovering about transpeople somehow seems to mean advocating for them. But he's not delineating those two things. All it means is that they should be accepted. Too tough, I guess. Too much thinking. Too great a challenge to manhood, as if he knows what that is.
No, he'd rather scare people into thinking that it represents a slippery slope. At the far end, it would mean, I suppose, that nobody can tell the difference between men and women any longer, that transpeople will be revealed all over the country, and that we will actually have to see them walk around in new clothes. That's so ridiculous it almost doesn't deserve commentary. And it won't win him any elections outside of Florida.
Beyond that, libraries are suddenly in distress because they include books about gay people and their sexuality. Some of those books are relatively new, but some have been there for quite a while. Nobody's made a big deal about them until now. Hasn't that occurred to the naysayers at all? Why haven't they considered that they might be getting duped by fear-mongering Republicans? And why haven't the gender preferences of our whole population been reversed or confused before our very eyes?
Instead of discovering what being gay is all about, these folks want to shove books into the same closet they'd rather see gay people put themselves back into. Intelligent conversations can't happen without a knowledge base. What's left is to maintain ignorance.
These ideas are suddenly re-emerging. It's as if people can't be happy unless they descend into the same vacuum of knowledge they once had. Thing is, they're not happy anyhow. They feel like being angry, and so they are. So they will stay.
Such conversations with such folks should be centered around that: What are you so angry about? Why does any of that affect you?
Then sit back and listen. And ask them what, if anything, they'd prefer that could actually happen.
Would it be that AP African-American studies, dismissed as "indoctrination" by Arkansas' governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, be cancelled or denied as qualification for graduation from the state's high schools? Note that those high schools are offering them anyhow. Note that the teachers' union has taken a stand in support of that course.
Note that learning can't be stopped. Note that "indoctrination" is, in point of fact, the cancellation of methods of inquiry that might help lots of people understand an important part of our history. "Indoctrination" is her preferred mode of education, not someone else's.
These people want us to stay stupid. Some people actually like that. Not me. Count me out.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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