Illiteracy and stupidity both have no limits

After having just talked about how the Internet has changed our way of thinking, I would also like to applaud Hedges's brevity.  He said what he needed to say without rambling.  My mind, having been changed over the past years by the Internet and Google, appreciated this.

I wrote this idea down after having read Hedges's first two sentences:

What scares me to think about is that the "majority America" Hedges's talks about takes headline news summaries and snippets of information that they find on the Internet as holding the same amount of truth that an in-depth news article holds.  This, in my opinion, is what has begun to make politics in America such a difficult affair.  Both sides hold firm beliefs in what they hear from their leaders that they don't do much thinking for themselves.  They rarely back facts up with credible information; instead they act as brainwashed zombies out to defend their radical viewpoints to the death.

Upon reading the rest of the article, I was delighted to find how in tune my fears are with Hedges's.  It appalls me to think that the only way to win an election in this country is to manipulate people with fear, propaganda and images but it is clearly becoming true.  No matter how few skeletons you have in your closet, how intelligent you are, how great your ideas are or how much experience you have, if you run a campaign that fails to advertise and publicize correctly, you have no chance of winning an election.

Hedges’s definition of literacy goes beyond the dictionary definition.  It’s not just about being able to read but it goes past that and deals with how one takes in information, certifies that it is correct and uses it in their life.  The illiterate in American society don’t just not know how to read but they are blatantly stupid as well.  This viewpoint of Hedges’s is one that I would completely agree with.  The masses of people in this country that can be manipulated by imagery and propaganda are what I’m most scared of.

Reading about how The Princeton Review did a study on the level of language used in political debates was appalling.  Not wanting to be like the illiterate masses, I made an attempt to check if this information was correct.  I couldn’t find the original study but I found another article by Diane Ravitch that used the same information: http://www.hoover.org/news/daily-report/25413. Assuming that this study was done accurately, even if the numbers are slightly off, there has obviously been a significant change in how politicians interact with their constituents.  This is yet another example of how our country as a whole is losing intelligence.  I’d even argue that high schools have gotten so bad that they provide the level of educational development that middle schools once provided.