Reactionary

Well, this New York Times article got me back from my self-imposed exile. I won’t say much more about the article and the woman being interviewed other than I completely agree with her. It’s the 900+ comments I take issue with.Granted, I only read about the first page worth of them but I was surprised to find a common theme that I find disturbing.  Comment after comment attempted to make the point that not everyone in the world is smart and that not everyone in the United States (I hate the use of “America” to denote one country) is stupid. I find this point annoying because it’s beside the point of the article and the interviewee. It’s so beside the point because it’s obvious and doesn’t need to be discussed. A commentator even suggested Ms. Jacobi go speak to poor immigrant children in Paris’ slums and see not-everyone-in-France-is-smart-so-there. See how flawed this reasoning is? You don’t? Go back to sleep. Clearly the divide between a schoolchild in the United States and a Tunisian immigrant in Framce is both obvious and vast and has nothing to do with the article and Ms. Jacobi’s concern that Americans don’t know things they should. A fair and on-point comparison would be between an American schoolchild and a French schoolchild of similar means. <i>That</i> is the divide that’s vast, frightening, and incomprehensible. When you compare two things, they must be similar in some way so the difference you are measuring is a true one.  

Posted on February 17th, 2008 under News, Rant •  Print •  Email • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback