So, today, after much of a hiatus that can only be explained as “stuff” happened, we are going to discus a bit of trend that I have picked up in the world. Has anyone seen the movie “Idiocracy”? If not rent it later. In the movie they throw an average man into a cryo-container and forget about him. He later wakes up and finds himself to be the smartest man on the planet. Now I agree that I do not think that things will degrade as bad as in the movie. Mainly because I think that the human race would have been dead long before anything got that bad. But the movie got my mind thinking and I didn’t like the direction it was going. Forewarning I think I am going to ramble a bit in this, and I might not be able to edit it out so that it makes better sense so I would like to apologize in advance.
        Now here is some of the stuff that has been bothering me. One, I am a fan of the classics be it literature or music. But I am in the minority. And I have come to the fact that reading I think is becoming a fad. Ok, so let me clarify that a bit. Reading in general is not passing out of style. People still learn to read, but other than reading to get by in day to day life I don’t think the average person reads much else. English is one of the most diverse languages in the world with a complex vocabulary to match. However, in the here and now English has become a vulgar vernacular at the most. If anyone reading this has ever read Shakespeare or Thoreau you can attest to the fact that people are not as verbose as we could be or were. Some of it is education’s fault and most of it is society’s fault for emphasizing television over imagination. Oh and it is never right to limit what a person can and can’t read. Now that I have said that I am going to put my foot in my mouth by saying that being mature enough to understand the content of a book is key. I read books as a kid and then again as an adult and took more away from that experience as I was older than when as a kid I read say Tolkien to just say that I have. But it drives me up a wall to hear about these people saying you shouldn’t read certain books because it is blasphemous. Number one, if it is fiction than it is just a story nothing more. Even if you do gain some insight from a book, and I encourage that very much, and it is able to rock your world and make you question your faith or beliefs. Well then it is time to check your beliefs in the first place because they couldn’t have been very strong. Two, what gives you the right to denounce something that you yourself will not even read. That is my biggest beef with people who denounce books is that most of the time they don’t even crack the covers of the books themselves. This still I think holds true to non-fiction as well. Every book ever written is in my opinion to be just someone else’s opinion anyway and always open to interpretation.
        This next thing hurts me a bit because I know that I have been guilty of it sometimes. Part of the downfall of society is one of our society’s greatest inventions. The internet. Billions upon billions of gigabytes of information just being spread all around. But with information so readily at hand comes with a cost. How many times have you googled for some information and then took the first hit and counted that information as truth? Well, that is what I have been seeing. People take the first bit of information they find on the internet as truth without even looking further or even using commonsense to see if what they found is even credible. It seems that commonsense has also taken a back seat to fast and easy. All it takes is a few extra steps to help ensure the validity of the source or just check out a few more sources and use your own judgment. And I don’t want you to take what I say at face value either. Feel out what I present to you in my rants with your own thoughts and then judge me right or false and then double check with reference sources. The biggest mistake of the people in the movie Idiocracy is the fact that they stopped thinking for themselves and that is the biggest problem that I am starting to see today. People take what they are fed from the media, interest groups, mass marketing and just go with it without trying to apply their own thoughts. Question your teachers, your boss, your mother, your government and you will the better for it. As always your questions and comments are welcome.