With Valentine's Day coming up, everyone must take a minute and remember their first love. I sure remember mine. I went to the library at Southwest Laurens Elementary and fell hard, not for a girl, though. I fell in love with books, nonfiction/ biography books to be exact, and ideas and knowledge. But there is not doubt that is truly a kind of love affair when you have intellectual epiphanies because learning is so revered. One of the saddest things about the country we live in now is that we do not seem to want smart people in our lives anymore. Smart presidents, can't have that. Scientists, what do they know? Newspaper editors, liars and fake news.
People used to get their news from newspapers because professional newsrooms took separating fact from fiction seriously and employed people who had studied how to do that. Now people get their news on Facebook by sharing, or as used to be called, "hearsay." Instead of all the news that is fit to print, you click on a link from your cousin Cletus who mops up at Steak N' Shake. Why waste money on a subscription to a newspaper when they just blow it on war correspondents? Gone are the Ben Bradley's of the world who brought a president to his knees way before Monica Lewinsky ever did. A student in a social media focus group once said, "If the news is important it will find me." Except it doesn't and that's how we ended up with President Bannon and his dummy, Donny.
It's not surprising that it can't find you since, on social media, news competes with videos of Russian car crashes, creepy clowns and a Rabbi doing the Mannequin Challenge. And you know how they say,"you can't make this shit up." Well, turns out you can. By election day last year, the top fake news on Facebook was getting more shares, clicks, and comments than the real news. Millions of people believed some straight up bullshit that the pope had endorsed Trump. When, in fact, after Trump won; the Pope said that he was, "praying for his enlightenment." To which God said, "I've done a lot of miracles, but give me a fucking break."
We used to respect scientists. That's why every stoner in 70's had a poster of Einstein right next to the poster of the black chick with the huge afro. But now only 36% of Americans say they have a lot of trusts that information from scientists is reliable. While 98% of scientists agree that humans have evolved over the millennia, but that view is shared by not nearly as many real Americans. Trump supporters do not think that species can change over time, but they do think that Trump used to be all about himself and now he is working for us. This Valentine's Day, can we please fall in love with knowledge again? Under President Obama, the Secretary of Energy was first a Nobel Prize winner and then a nuclear physicist. Not that Trump's pick does not have impress credentials that he has shown off on "Dancing With The Stars." How did it happen? We went from being led by the smartest person in the room to the biggest jackass on Twitter.
