New and Old Odds and Ends-Part Two

A favorite platitude of all politicians, whether American or any other nationality, is to say that the American (or Iraqi, or Israeli, or Afghani, or Pakistani, etc., etc. people) are intelligent people in aggregate who know what is going on and how things should be. They say these words especially when they are running for elective office. I doubt very much that this is true. Intelligence depends for humans as a whole on education, and beyond that, on what your education was and the time and place in which you received it.

Some of my family, for example, are well educated, while other close members were or are not. My father, who did not finish high school, was a thinker. My mother, who had a college education, was not. My two children were hippies who went off into lala land for a year or two when we lived in the Bay Area, then individually and on their own earned degrees – one as a successful landscape contractor, and the other as an accomplished printer. It took me until I was 42 to earn a master’s degree.

My family moved to Wyoming during the Depression of the 30’s, where my parents bought a cattle ranch. But it was his foreman, Elmer, who ran it. I don’t know what his formal education was, but his true education was in running a ranch.

What I’m getting at is that the time (Depression) and place (a sparsely populated community) as well as an era (before communication came of age), are of tremendous importance. There was a 5 or 6 page local newspaper, there was no world news except for the Newsreels in the theaters, and radio news did not appear until WWII. So you can see education depends on who you are, where you are, what’s available, and what you do with it.

And so, if you were an Iraqui or Afghani farmer either farming or tending your herd in a land of vast spaces, what must have been your reaction to our invasions of those countries? Did you know what led up to those invasions? What did you think when our forces destroyed your crops, your animals, and your families? And didn’t we see film on TV of many of those men being rounded up and sent to Guantanamo as terrorists, though, to date, very few have been charged? If any of them fought back, would you have done the same in their place?

Unfortunately, education continues and will continue to shape human beings. If you watch the quality, or lack thereof, of entertainment and information available to the average person today, and if you have contact with them which reveals how and what they think, you find a vast area of difference in the educational background of the individual and the use he or she has made of it.

ARW
3/30/08