|
When I was about 12 years old I remember the hoopla over President Nixon. I'm sure I rolled my eyes then, but I've never forgotten the shame that people felt in having to impeach someone so corrupt that the majority of Americans had supposedly elected democratically. The shame of Americans who've elected Bush and his henchmen is somewhat on all of us, even if the first election was rigged, the second one could have been won by a much better margin if more had been involved.
For my own kids who seem to lean very much to the right in spite of much liberal exposure and teaching them tolerance, I can only hope that they will recognize the folly of their parents generation and not repeat history in their own future. Here it is, only 30 years or so since the fall of Nixon and we've managed to bring in someone far worse, more corrupt, more vulgar, more delusional, more sinister and evil than even Richard M. Nixon. I hope I can encourage my kids to research and vote with an informed and well thought out decision rather than some random scratch on a ballot out of obligation.
When I read much of what is on the net I'm really disgusted and annoyed at the ignorance, naivety, and absolute stupidity that so many teens and youth exhibit in regards to things they clearly know nothing about. They reflect a broken educational system, an apathy for character or values, and often an incomprehensible illiteracy that seems rampant. Yet these same teens with access to all the information in the world that the net and our modern media provides are even less informed, less verbally skilled, seemingly incapable of forming a full thought, sentence or even whole word than their parents were at their ages. Perhaps they have so much to choose from that they have the attention spans of fleas, flitting from one topic to the next without any concentration of thought or flow of ideas.
I know opinions make me sound like a fuddy duddy old woman standing with a hose on my lawn ready to hose anything that isn't 35 or older, but it seems to be the exception rather than the norm to find a literate teen with more than an emoticon vocabulary. Even my son who is a math genius seems to prefer to acronym or abbreviate everything. How hard is it to write a whole word? Why does this catch on and consume the airways of written words? With all the time they seem to have to surf the net you'd think they'd be able to learn to spell or even use spell check.
Ok, off my soapbox. I'm glad to meet someone who knows how to write.
|