The Consequences of Weaponized Ignorance

America has responded to COVID-19 like a lazy science student:

study the textbook for a little while, then get bored and wing it.

The mixture of impatience and cockiness has cost thousands of lives.

The country has tricked itself into a false dilemma:  

We either save the economy or fight the virus. 

But the best way to save the economy was to fight the virus.

If we had done this properly and stuck with it,

we would be in much better shape now. 

-Michael Rosenberg

A quick trip into the WABAC Machine (not-so-very-long-ago edition):

We embrace technology and the advances it has brought us, including the advances we never knew we needed such as the ability to order shoes or play Angry Birds using our smartphone while going to the bathroom.  At the same time, we have consciously and aggressively embraced ignorance.  Worse yet, we have embraced it to the point of weaponizing it.  Ah, the irony, which I have little doubt is lost on those to whose behavior it speaks most pointedly.  

When did we the people of these United States become a people who flaunt our unwillingness to be challenged by anyone with an opposing point of view?  Or by anyone who might want to simply educate us - even just a little bit?  Was it when we elected a President of the United States who wears his "I don't read" mantra as if it is a badge of honor?  I know not.  Perhaps.  On the other hand, perhaps his election was not its beginning but its culmination. 

I know simply that our weaponization of ignorance has permeated our politics at every level.  Political opponents are no longer rivals or even adversaries.  Now, they are enemy combatants. As such, they are not entitled to certain rights, such as engaging in fact-based, law-based, substantive debate on issues of importance.  Debate has been replaced by the rapid repetition of attacks, insults, and lies, aimed at reinforcing in the minds and hearts of supporters the idea that everything said by everyone on the other side of the issue is not only a lie but a lie aimed at taking an inalienable right away from them, or worse yet, manipulating them into surrendering it voluntarily.  

We have time to correct our course - right up to the point when we run out of it altogether.  Course correction is not a Democrat thing.  Course correction is not a Republican thing.  It is an American thing.

I wrote that here, in this space, on Christmas Eve.  I wrote it seven short months ago.  I wrote it at a time when I had little idea what COVID-19 was or the extent to which it was going to alter not just my life but everyone's life.  

One's true colors are not revealed in the best of times but, rather, in the worst of times. In the five months that COVID-19 has ravaged the United States, taking the lives of more than 148,000 and the livelihoods of millions more, the true color of far too many Americans has been revealed to be neither red, white, nor blue but, instead, selfishness. 

As a student of human behavior, the things people do rarely surprise me.  The ignorance on prominent display across America, perhaps at no address more prominently than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., has not surprised me. It has, however, disappointed me.  More than that, however, it has angered me.  

Opinions without evidence to support them are not facts. No matter how loudly you proclaim them. No matter how faithfully you and your fellow blind mice worship at the feet of the Prevaricator-in-Chief and his newest mouthpiece, Kayleigh McEnany.  Spoiler Alert for Ms. McEnany:  Paw Patrol has not been cancelled. Lego has not stopped selling Police-themed sets.  She knew that to be true even when she said what she said from the podium during her July 24, 2020 press briefing and still she said it.  Why?  Her mission is to distract from an abject failure of leadership. The best way to do it? Foment outrage over any target of opportunity. 

There is no outrage quite like faux outrage, which after all is a consequence of weaponized ignorance. 

-AK