May 2, 2007
Today someone sent me a link to a video on YouTube.
It showed some Coalition soldiers in a Humvee throwing a Flashbang stun-grenade at an Iraqi shepherd and his flock of sheep. They thought it was hilarious – the soldiers, that is. Not the person who sent me the link – and certainly not the sheep.
It made me feel sick.
Have we sunk so low that we find such gratuitous brutality amusing?
I’m afraid that we have. The generation that we spawned and raised on PacMan has come of age, passed through what passes for Education nowadays, been issued with the means to kill and maim - and sent as ambassadors to invade yet another sovereign nation and tear it back down to the Stone Age.
Yay! Let’s hear it for the bullies!
For those of us still with the ability to think it appears as a nightmare from which there is no awakening.
How, we ask ourselves, has this come about?
Well, let’s examine the facts.
Back when the young Abraham Lincoln was walking to the one-room schoolhouse where he garnered his education roughly eighty-percent of the population was literate. Debating societies flourished and eloquence was encouraged. Now we have an educational system that appears to be designed to dumb everyone down to a common level and where basic remedial reading classes are a part of the syllabus of many colleges and centers of higher education.
Pliny the Elder opined that unless a man possess the word he cannot conceive the thought. Hence we now have a society where thought is suspect. However, without thought we are reduced to an animalistic level of consciousness.
Lower, even - as animals, in general, possess a much finer moral sense than that shown by those grenade-tossing sons of our loins.
Psychologists call such behavior ‘reptilian’. When one’s cerebration is reduced to such a primitive level, then any form of antisocial action is possible. At this level, for instance, it becomes quite logical for a disgruntled student to arm himself with the means to end many lives and then decimate a classroom.
For, is this really any different, we must ask ourselves, from what we are asking of those whom we send to Iraq?
Why has this decline been allowed to happen? I fear that it has been actively fostered in order to create a population that is easy to manipulate. A populace that can think for itself is likely to ask inconvenient questions. How much better, therefore, to encourage a drone society that will bend to the will of its government… and will do its bidding - without thinking.
Have we slipped too far? Is there anything to be done, to reverse this slide – or is it inexorable?
As I see it, what we must do is reform the WHOLE system of education so that our children are EDUCATED and not merely trained to fill pre-determined slots in our society. We must throw away any forms that merely require a checkmark rather than a lucidly considered answer from the student. We must make him, or her, THINK.
Then - and only then - do we as a society have a chance to redeem our humanity.
The ball is in our court.
