I've spent the last week reading a variety of reactions to the May 1 events in Pakistan and, while there can be little doubt that Obama has chalked up a mighty big accomplishment, the grudging admiration and the insistence that Georgie Porgie be given a lion's share of the credit, leaves me almost permanently gob-smacked.
Instructing has never been my strong suit, and I'm equally challenged in the convincing department. Therefore, I am totally frustrated when faced with people possessed of an unreasoning determination to see everything through a prism of willing ignorance.
The man dressed in the redneck uniform of camouflage jacket with John Deere on the visor of his cap standing on the other side of the gas pump on Thursday, swearing at the price of the gas and blaming our national debt entirely on Obama, could not be reached with facts. Why did I try? Sheesh!
The woman who considered Dubya's baseball pitch across the plate right after bin Laden destroyed half of lower Manhattan a far more bracing antidote for what ails us than President Obama's elimination of the murdering bastard.
These are people at least marginally conscious and whom you would think would be easy to reach with information...but they are not. They are not because as my sweet and gentle stepfather frequently quoted when faced with an obdurate fool, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still."
What does it take to change the will of the stupid, the bigoted and the uninformed? How do you even broach a mind fixed in such rigidity? It appears it can happen only through forcefed education since we don't seem to have a country inhabited by those who seek information.... beyond what entertains them.
How do priests and the Glenn Becks make people believe unquestioningly all that religious offal, and teachers can't even get them to learn how to read and spell and think?
Until we have an educated population, surely even the dream of peace and prosperity is unattainable.
