I was cleaning my email inbox when I came across the article, “In Flag City USA, False Obama Rumors Are Flying.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901871.html)
Said and submitted in posts before, I’ll say it again: Ignorance is a wholly voluntary choice, and not one to be the least proud of, especially in the Internet age, where being informed is so incredibly easy.
The main character in the story, Jim Peterman, is an icon of everything that has led to the sorry state this country finds itself in. He has “watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth.” No, Jim Peterman, of Findlay, Ohio is a lazy fool of a fellow. Watching the news will provide only the perspective the commercial advertisers that sponsor the news feel will best move their product or service. And a campaign advertisement . . . You ever hear a car dealer scream how the vehicles on his lot are a lot of junk?
Then the story quotes poor Peterman plaintiffly complaining, after listening to the opinions voiced in his neighbor’s house and at his son’s auto shop, “It’s like you’re hearing about two different men with nothing in common. It makes it impossible to figure out what’s true, or what you can believe.” No! Mr. Peterman, you have personally made a choice to be stupid. It is NOT impossible to figure out what’s true. You’re just plain lazy. You don’t want to invest the very few moments necessary to do just a tad of research on your own, you want someone else to do that, then spoon feed you the truth. Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way.
Peterman claims that Don LeMaster, a Navy veteran and his neighbor of 40 years, “heard from a friend in Toledo that . . .” He further tells how his friend, Leroy Pollard, ostensibly a “good family man” is “so convinced that Obama is a radical Muslim that he [Pollard] threatened to stop talking to his daughter when he heard she might vote for him.”
By now, everyone reading this likely is regarding Peterman as much a sorry dolt as I do, that he’s some anomaly, not at all typical of the American voter. Everyone reading this may feel inclined to perceive Peterman as not typical, but my bet is that everyone reading this knows tragically how very typical Peterman is. Peterman suggests “these are good people, smart people. How can they really all be wrong?”
And you might suppose that Peterman considers his thought processes as logical, even though he has demonstrated a complete inability to think logically: goodness has a zero logical connection with correctness —Yes! they can all be wrong. Recall only how the entirety of the Roman Catholic hierarchy insisted that Galileo’s proposition that the earth revolved about the sun had to be absolutely wrong. (As you read the article below, hopefully you’ll also arrive at the conclusion that the folks in the story aren’t even “good people,” they’ve volunteered of their respective volitions to be frightened, small-minded, bigoted people.)
If Peterman wanted to know what a certain aspect of Navy life was like, from LeMaster’s limited experience, he might have been justified in asking the Navy veteran. And if he was seeking advice concerning an automobile transmission problem, maybe asking his son would be a good place to start. But I wonder, would 74-year-old Peterman defer referring to a heart specialist, upon the onset of severe chest pains, preferring instead the counsel of either Mr. LeMaster, his own son, or his friend Leroy?
As Mr. Peterman refuses to think for himself, to ask himself the really tough questions, then to search for himself the answers . . . Mr. Peterman is a very stupid fool. He has made that choice, completely voluntarily, and completely unnecessarily. He is not a hapless, helpless person. None of us are. Like Peterson, we have been blessed from birth with the most incredible tool: a brain. Why then do so many of us refuse to use it?
And why is it, when we hear folks expounding ridiculously (“Ridiculous”: that which is susceptible to ridicule.) that we cannot tersely call them on it? Your father, or mother, maybe your sister, or your best friend tells you, in all seriousness, that they “heard from this fellow over in Porterville who knew someone whose prostate cancer was cured by eating 100 jellybeans a day for 100 days, and that doctors don’t want that cure to get out because of all the money they make, and that you should try that, rather than doing what your physician recommended.”
You’d have no trouble responding, “Know what? You’re as dumb as that tree stump out back,” if you in fact had a tree stump out back. How is it then that saying the same thing to your father, or mother, or sister, or best friend is literally quite impossible when they utter something similarly ridiculous?
The point(s), again: one, you have a brain that is yours and yours alone — USE IT; two, do NOT rely on the evening news for all your news, or on anyone you know personally for any of it — that’s being both lazy and stupid; three, being lazy and stupid is a choice you make freely — do NOT make that choice, do NOT be a Jim Peterman from Findlay, Ohio, or from anywhere, USA.
— Ed Tubbs
Oakland, CA
