Revising Iliteracy

Either Hedge is really angry with the American people or he is right. I don’t know if enough people are paying attention to him but we should all read his article “America the Illiterate.” Let’s face it we as a population are just about retarded. There are people out there that can’t do simple math to balance their checkbook, with a calculator I might add. I’ve seen it! There are also people that at a grocery store try to use a coupon on the wrong bottle of detergent. They’re excuse is that it looks like the one in the picture. That may be true but there is always a size or special scent that people can’t see in the picture. I worked as a cashier for a small chain of grocery stores in my home area and I can’t tell you how dumb the average population is. This grocery store that I worked in wasn’t in the best neighborhood, but I’m not saying these people were the scum of the earth either. These people were average middle class Americans. They all probably had a TV in their family room and a car in their garage. As Hedge defined the illiterates, these people probably couldn’t understand a loan contract from their bank but surely enough voted for Obama because they fell for simple mind games in his campaign. These illiterates are the mindless zombies that do the same thing every day following the time constraints put on themselves because they want to watch CSI at 9:00. I’m not the best reader in the world and admit that some things in hedge’s article I didn’t understand. This includes many of the complex words. However, I do have the mental capacity to understand what he was saying by trying to understand the words using in text clues, and thus I was able to read the article and find his message in it. Unlike Carr who thinks we as a people are being made stupid by Google, Hedge turns and says that we are stupid because we are entertained at a middle school level and choose not to challenge our minds so that we think at a higher level. We prefer pictures because it’s easier to understand the picture than read the words under it. Next thing we know we’ll be ordering our food from pop-up menus, far out dude.

Now I know I'm not going and doing what the prompt had exactly asked me to do and revised this blog and reposted it but I think I rather post it again to let you read it and then talk about it. Know I have come to the conclusion that in this previous article I was a little harsh of my brothers and sisters of the stars and stripes. People are really smart and can do a lot of amazing things. I understand that after a long hard day at the factory and shop that not to many people want to go home and think to hard. People want to go home and relax and give their minds a break. I understand. I really do cause I try to do the exact same thing if I can. The brain is like a muscle though. You need to continuously work it and use it or you could eventually lose your mind. I have two great examples of that in my life. My father's mother and My mother's grandmother. They are roughly the same age, and were both house wives for most of their lives. The biggest difference between the two however is what they did with their spare times and what they continue to do in their lives and their mental status. My father's mother, Althea, is as sharp as a tack still. She spends most of her time now is spent doing crosswords, sudoku, and other mind challenging games and puzzles. My great grandmother doesn't know the time of year any more. She thought it was thanksgiving on her birthday which is July 12. She has spent most of her life watching her stories. Now I'm not saying this is indefinite proof because there may be a lot more to the differences between them. Maybe I was right that the people are illiterate. They have lost the ability to use their mind in order to complete certain tasks because they haven't used their mind to do so. It's always been mind over matter, but what if our minds don't work?