After reading Bill Maher’s August 7 post on the Huffington Post, I decided to repost this article. I can’t tell if America is getting more ignorant, or if it was always that way and the internet and 24 hour cable has just brought it to light. Either way, it’s very disturbing.

This issue has been festering with me for some time, but I haven’t been able to really crystallize it until now.

It started with the woman who claimed during the 2008 Presidential campaign that Barack Obama was a terrorist. This is the woman John McCain had to stop and correct, telling the woman that Obama was “a decent man”. The festering got much worse when Sarah Palin was not able to tell Katie Couric what publications she was reading, presumably because she doesn’t read any.

Now, let me be clear about something. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. This is an American issue, and here’s the deal: There is a large majority of Americans out there who are just plain lazy. They sit there on their overstuffed couches watching television shows with this particular expert and bias or that particular expert and bias, and they take what they hear as gospel because they’re too lazy to investigate things for themselves.

In an age where access to information is unprecedented, where all you have to do is use your favorite search engine to get all the facts on an issue, America has decided to turn off its collective intellect and go completely and utterly brain dead. To the point that anyone who actually does check these things out and puts forth an informed counterpoint is labeled “elitist” by those who haven’t picked up a book in so long they can’t remember how to open one.

The biggest danger to America today is not from foreign terrorists, or domestic terrorists, or the stimulus package, or anything else like that. The biggest danger to America today is that Americans are just plain lazy. The biggest danger to America is that Americans have delegated their responsibility for keeping themselves informed to the talking heads inside the electronic box, as if these people were somehow the anointed illuminati.

The biggest danger to America is the wave of voluntary illiteracy and voluntary ignorance that is sweeping this nation. It is evil, it is insidious, and it will, in the end, be more successful at bringing down the country than a hundred Osama bin Ladens.

© 2009, Mac Williams. All rights reserved.

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