Ignorance may not be Bliss

I think we can all agree that a realistic optimism should be the basis of our governance. The malaise of Jimmy Carter was in direct contrast to the cheerful optimism of his successor and it was reflected by the attitude of most Americans.

Today a pessimism prevails and the negativity of the news cycle proves the point. The prevalence of this despondency was made clear to me following a quite innocent encounter with a young server at a local Chick Fil A restaurant.

After a drive thru order has been placed each car passes a blackboard advising: “What to know.” Usually there is a product offering or information about the menu. On that day the board remained but there was nothing written suggesting exactly what it was we should know. Being feisty, i.e. obnoxious, I asked the young lady who was poised to deliver my order why there was nothing I should know that day.

There was immediate puzzlement which I clarified and she asked if I wanted her to get the manager to put something on the sign. I told her I would happy to do that and she asked me what I would write. I responded with: “Global Warming is a fraud!” I was stunned when this young lady told me I was clearly wrong because she was quite sure that we were all going to die because of climate change. I asked a couple of questions designed to elicit some sense of how she reached that depressing conclusion. Her response was instructive…she got all hers news from the internet and she believed it without reservation. So, for example, she firmly believes that the polar bears are disappearing despite all evidence to the contrary.

I returned to pick up lunch a week later and gave her a small stack of articles from experts with the hope that she might come to see that there was no basis for her almost religious belief that the world will be ending in 12 years. She admitted several weeks later that she had never even read the material I gave her. The problem may have been that none of the material was from internet news sources.

These encounters left me very troubled but it is, sadly, consistent with the mindset of many young people. How else to explain the following.

1. The teenage suicide rate is growing dramatically.
2. Drug use and accompanying deaths is on the rise.
3. Violent acts by young people are in the news more than ever.
4. A growing number of high school and college graduates live with their parents because they see no long-term future for themselves.
5. The young in this country are embracing socialism (which they can’t even define) in record numbers perhaps because it relieves them of the need to work for the future.

All of which begs the question: Why is this happening? Consider the relentless barrage of negative news that emanates daily from government officials and purveyors of internet “news”. The young lady from Chick Fil A is a case in point: “We’re all going to die.” How did this person arrive at the point where she sees no future for herself. It robs her of the will to dream of and plan for the possibility of living happily ever after. It destroys the desire to learn and grow. It is beyond comprehension. And it depressed me.

In my youth we did drills in preparation for a missile attack from the Soviet Union. Little did I know that my home town was #8 on the Soviet hit list. Families built bomb shelters and stocked them for the big boom. In any case three or four times a year we filed out into the halls of our school and sat with our heads between our knees and waited for the end of the world. Certainly survival was not a factor in the calculus as the school would have been rubble had an ICBM struck the area. But not once did any of those students let it impact our plans for a long life.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) is the latest driver of this depression inducing news cycle. She feverishly predicts environmental doom acting as a verbal sandwich board advising that the end is nigh. Happily she is dead wrong. Sadly she is blithely unaware of the negative impact she is having on young people across the country. She is a lethal combination of arrogance and ignorance and by all measures she is always wrong but never in doubt. The internet does not question her apocalyptic drumbeat and provides no counterbalance to her preposterous projections.

Young people today are not taught to think critically or exercise intellectual curiosity. Teachers propagandize and discourage an honest exchange of conflicting opinions. The result is a generation of kids who will believe whatever they are told and are incapable of challenging even those things that are counter intuitive. This is a depressing reality that is evident in what we see and hear on college campuses today.

A wonderful example of this ovine mentality was provided by a group of first or second graders who were delivered to the office of Senator Diane Feinstein to demand government action to address man-made global climate change. They dutifully repeated the chamber of horrors lines they had been taught by their teacher who was there to ensure that they performed as rehearsed. The teacher jumped in to do her AOC impersonation which demonstrated only that she had no idea what she was talking about. Her charges had clearly been brainwashed.

Equally distressing is the unceasing effort to ensure that Black Americans continue to believe that they live in a nation populated largely by white supremacists and that racism is alive and well in the US. This despite the fact that we elected and then reelected a Black President. Blacks are told that the police are intent on killing people of color while the news studiously ignores the killing fields of Chicago where Black on Black homicide takes hundreds of lives every year.

We are told that there is ongoing voter suppression which explains why Stacy Abrams is not the new Governor of Georgia. The fact is that she lost by some 50,000 votes and there has been no evidence presented of any actual voting irregularities. We have to worry about “microaggressions” that are ill-defined and totally subjective. The best example of the fake news that drives the wedge between the races is the Jussie Smollett case in Chicago. People were so anxious to embrace a racial hate crime that they refused to investigate the actual fraud that was perpetrated by Smollett. It had to be real because it would confirm the undercurrent of racism even in Chicago. Everyone should have known something was amiss because the odds of there being two MAGA hats in Chicago was infinitesimally small.

Is it any wonder that young Blacks see no hope for the future? When President Obama and Attorney General Holder did nothing to heal the racial divide we lost a wonderful opportunity to solve a problem that is the backbone of Democrat party politics. Happily Trump is bringing optimism to the Black community in the form of jobs and better wages.

Where is the optimism of Reagan when we need it? Trump’s greatest line to date summed up the quality of the Democrat candidates for President: “350 million people and this is the best you can do!”

The only good news I can find on this subject is that the “never birthers” will not be reproducing. The one positive result of the hoax that is global climate change.