Saturday, August 29, 2009

The (Approximately) Quarterly Moron Report

Hey guys… just in time for back to school.
I’ve been wondering, is it something in the water? I really want to believe that the system works. I want to believe that white collar professionals are not morons. I want to believe that college students have to be smart (or at least show more measurable brain activity than a coma patient on Quaaludes), but time and time again my ability to believe that is deeply shaken.
A girl I know was examining a hundred dollar bill, and she asked what number president Benjamin Franklin was. (No, wait, there’s more.) I tried explaining that Benjamin Franklin wasn’t a president, but she adamantly insisted that he was because a) he was on the hundred dollar bill and b) she learned about his presidency in high school. The argument continued, and in order to convince her that Benjamin Franklin was not a president, I had to print up a list of the United States presidents off the internet. I showed her the list, and she smacked herself on the forehead (thank god someone did) and laughed. “Oh my God!” she said. “I totally had him confused with this guy.” The name she pointed to was Franklin Roosevelt. She had actually managed to confuse Franklin Roosevelt with Benjamin Franklin, in spite of the two centuries between them.
That isn’t the punch line either. The punch line is that she’s studying to be a high school teacher. She is currently in college and receiving above average passing grades. You can say, “Well maybe it wasn’t her day,” or maybe that “history may not be her subject” (Duh! Boy, is that one hell of an understatement.), but no. It doesn’t end there. This girl also didn’t know that there was water in coffee, or that Canada and Europe have a postal system.
It gets worse. This girl will be studying abroad in Germany, which means she will be representing all of us on foreign soil. I can visualize her now at the U.S embassy saying “I don’t know how I ended up in Deutschland, but I was trying to get to Germany.” At which point I will seriously consider renouncing my citizenship and moving to Canada.
Here are some more highlights from the world of academia:
A Future Police Officer- In a discussion regarding the ingredients of Brisk Ice Tea vs. normal soda I asked “What do you think high fructose corn syrup is made out of?” She replied, “Maple?” This same future-Detroit’s-finest accidentally scheduled herself for night classes instead of day classes by some mistake that is as yet unknown. But that’s okay because at least she read that tanning can cause melanoma, which was a weight off her chest because Chaz had told her tanning can give you skin cancer. And she almost, like, um, totally believed him and stuff! LOL.
They might as well just start painting “To Protekct and Surv” on the cars right now.
An Architect in Training- I was picking out my classes for this semester, and I mentioned that it would be interesting to take a botany class, and that was when the Frank-Lloyd-Wright-to-be asked me what kind of robots I would be studying.
Why ones with lasers of course!
A Wannabe Vet Tech- “If America has a deficit, why don’t we just print more money? That‘s the easiest way to solve the problem.”
A Male Nursing Student- “Alchemy is easy. All you do is you take gold and tin and add some protons.” Oh my God! Why didn’t I think of that- oh wait… I remember… I didn’t think of that because it’s completely idiotic and even the smartest alchemists with the best equipment have failed. People make more money off meth labs than alchemy labs.
Go ahead and laugh, but this guy is going to be administering medical treatment to you or your loved ones. Each of these individuals could play a role that is vital to your life in some respect in the near future. They’ll be taking care of your pets, or designing your house, or maybe responding to an emergency call in a life threatening situation.
And that scares the shit out of me. All sarcasm aside, it’s simply scary.
It’s possible that the system will weed these individuals out before they are in a position to do any real damage, but think about this: they’ve already passed every standardized test the U.S. requires to enter the work force. They’ve managed to make it through college for at least a year. Theoretically, those are two hurdles that are put in place to keep people like this from leaving school in the first place. It’s the reason why school exists in the first place.
I this what our founding fathers’ had in mind when they signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1492? I don’t think so buster! When Jesus wrote in the Geneva Convention that all men are created equaled and are… incarcerated… by their creator with certain alienated rights and one of those rights is freedom of speech and the right to bare false witness against the accused, I’m sure he intended for people to be held accountable for the things they say.
I may not be a botanist, but I know when things are going to hell. Can I site any specific reasons or evidence for my beliefs? No!
But think about this… I read just the other day that there’s H2O in our water supply. In fact, did you know that you can’t even drink a glass of water from your tap without drinking H20? There’s even H2O in rain. Fish are breathing it, and we’re eating the fish. In fact, we consume so much H2O that our bodies are mainly made of it. H2O is a chemical compound, which means it could cause melanoma or even skin cancer.
On top of all this, we’re cutting down our beautiful oaks trees just for their maple sap so that we can make corn syrup for our sodas. Then we take the aluminum out of our ground to make cans, because the government doesn’t even realize that aluminum is made out of tin, and you can make tin into gold if we just added protons. If we turned all of our aluminum into gold then we could print more money so we have no homeless people and no deficit.
Our 400th president, Benjamin Franklin, must have had a promotion about the future when he said “a stitch in time is worth a pound of cure.” It’s even in the Bible. Look it up. Is this the kind of country you want to live in?
It’s funny, but it isn’t that far removed from reality. This is ultimately what happens in a country where you’re free to remain ignorant, and there is neither an expectation nor a demand for you to do otherwise. Laugh now, but when you get arrested by Officer Brainless five years from now, and your lawyer thinks habeas corpus is a metal band, don’t come crying to me.
Oh… and do you want to hear something really scary? One word… UFOlogist.

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