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| As A Child, You Saw a Daddy Mule Loving a Mommy Mule |
The reason I can state this statistic with such confidence is a recent survey concluded one in four people did not know the sun goes around the earth. In another question they were presented with a picture of an ass, and a picture of a hole in the ground. They could not tell the difference.
Pause for a moment and think how chilling this fact is. If there are four people, one of them is a complete idiot. If you have three friends, chances are one of them is an utter dolt. If you look at your three friends and they seem to have normal intelligence, then it's you.
How is such widespread stupidity even possible in a technological age such as ours? Answer: it's because we live in a technological age.
You don't have to understand satellites to have a GPS. You don't have to believe in satellites; you can believe the world is flat and that a voice is giving you turn-by-turn instructions because the little box is possessed by the spirit of a helpful genie. You can believe the earth is only five thousand years old and still fill up your car with fossil fuels.
I myself have not the remotest idea of how anything works. Computers - I know it has to do with zeroes and ones, but I've got a feeling there's more to it than that - search engines - that metaphor doesn't even make sense; how can an engine search? - even the good ol' internal combustion engine - as far as I can see, it's magic; simply turn a key and the icecaps melt. The most sophisticated mechanical device I understand is a ball-cock flush system. Oft times do I take the lid off a toilet tank just to reassure myself; I know what all that stuff does!
Our ancestors could not slide by with such ignorance. If you had a mule for example, you needed to know about the maintenance and upkeep of mules. Your mommy never had to tell you where baby mules come from - when a daddy mule and a mommy mule love each other very much... - because you'd seen daddy mules loving mommy mules. You'd seen daddy pigs loving mommy pigs, and daddy sheep loving mommy sheep, and probably Uncle Ted loving a mommy sheep too, though he paid you not to tell anyone.
We, however, live in a world of man-made marvels that have rendered us dumb as posts. In a moment I will push a little button on my screen - except it's not a button, and I won't really "push" it, but I will seem to - and this post will go "live" so that potentially billions of people around the earth can read it, although in reality, it will be about seven.
Please do not ask me how this is possible.
