Reply #122: "We're so preooccupied trying to survive.."

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Oh yes, I heard a variation on that from college students when I was teaching. I was asking them why they didn't attend the foreign film series that was shown during January Term. (The only people who went were faculty, students who were required to be there, and a few townspeople).

The most common excuse was, "We lead such stressful lives that when we go to the movies, we just want to be entertained."

Stressful lives! This from affluent eighteen-year-olds who grew up in the suburbs and never lacked for anything. These were the students, who when asked, as part of the interview for going on study tours, "What is the most stressful thing that ever happened to you and how did you handle it?" would say, "I don't know. Starting college, I guess."

One of the colleges where I taught sponsored a program where foreign students were given money to put on a dinner made up of foods from their homelands. The first 30 members of the college community who signed up could get a free Indonesian or Guatemalan or Japanese or West African meal cooked by students from those countries. Do you know who went to these well-publicized events? Faculty and other foreign students. At none of these dinners (capacity 30) did I see more than two American students.

After a few years, I could interpret their attitude only as willful ignorance, an attitude that one of my former employers characterized as, "Dumb... and PROUD of it."

I recommend a book called Coming Home Crazy by a Minnesota writer named Bill Holm. It's about his time teadching English at a university in China, where the students were so eager to learn that they'd follow him home, wanting to talk more about the literature they were studying. He then came home to teach in a Minnesota state college, where he heard things like, "Do we have to read the whole book?"

I don't think Americans are inherently stupid, at least not more so than any other nationality, but our mass media have deliberately dumbed people down. They serve up increasingly stupid programs on the excuse that "this is what people want." Hmm, I missed the mass demonstrations in the streets demanding WWF wrestlilng and all those reality shows.