If Stupidity Was A Commodity, Our Economy Would Be Booming
When the Founding Fathers were planning and debating the formation of a new country, they decided that democracy wasn't such a hot idea. They were, after all, like Obama and all his Harvard buddies, elitists.
They wisely decided that placing the power to govern directly in the hands of the unwashed masses was a sure path to chaos and anarchy. They weren't about to hand "Joe-the-plumber" and "Bob-the-blacksmith" the reins of power. Instead, they decided to make the United States a republic, which is to say a system where we would have the power to elect representatives, who would then sit in Congress and make the actual decisions of government. The theory was that the elected representatives would be our betters, better educated, better informed, members of the intellectual aristocracy. They would decide what was good for the country, even when the country didn't know what was good for itself.
Nice theory, but it doesn't always work out. If it did, George W. Bush wouldn't have been president even once, let alone twice, and Rod Blagojevich would most likely have spent his career as a pimp for the Chicago mob rather than governor of Illinois. This is what happens when you can't place a minimum IQ requirement on voting.
Not that Jefferson and Adams and Franklin were totally off the mark. It could be worse. You don't have to look very far to become convinced that we've been fishing in the shallow end of the genetic pond for a few generations too many. Just a quick surf around the TV dial would be enough to convince almost any objective observer that perhaps we ought to rethink our definition of "civilization". One viewing of Jersey Shore alone would no doubt prompt an advanced alien race to vaporize the planet to make way for a chain of galactic taco stands.
Need more proof that our educational system is failing miserably to produce rational intelligent well-informed citizens capable of logical thought and deductive reasoning? Let's ignore for the moment that a large majority of humanity, not just Americans, firmly believe that their lives and the orbits of the tiniest sub-atomic particles in the furthest stars of the most distant galaxies are controlled in real-time by a magical being in the sky who not only listens in on their every thought, but is intimately concerned with what those thoughts contain. That alone ought to make you wonder how we ever got further along than apes beating each other with sticks.
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