Ignorance for Tomorrow

by Mona Shaw

They don't know anything.

A few years ago I was sitting in a room of recent college graduates. I asked them what they thought about a column I'd given them. None of them had read it.

When I asked for why, a young man said smugly, "I don't read anything longer than 200 words."

"Seriously," I asked, truly boggled.

"If you can't say it in 200 words, you have nothing to say," he said.

The rest in the room agreed with him.

A young woman added, "Maybe other people our age do, but college kids don't read things that are long. You didn't go to college, did you?"

She was serious. It wasn't just that I wondered how they'd earned their degrees, it was their pride in this position that floored me.

There weren't particularly patient at needing to teach their wisdom regarding effective communication to this old woman. How could I not know this?

They'd never read "The Color Purple," and didn't know who Alice Walker was. One thought she may have seen the movie.

"Wasn't Oprah in that?"

They'd never read anything by W.E.B du Bois, or Frederick Douglass or Tillie Oleson or Angela Davis, when she was still radical.

They were proud to know a few quotes of Martin Luther King, Jr., (and they knew who that was), but none had read any of his brilliant essays in their entirety, not even "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."

Of course, none of them had read Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." The point of the novel was lost on them anyway.

When I repeated Bradbury's famous quote, "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them," they shrugged.

They'd all come from uncommonly privileged lives, families where they received new cars when they graduated. They were all white.

Those who put their time, their souls, their blood into writing about the panorama and diaspora of human suffering offered nothing they needed to learn.

They weren't curious about them either. They resented the notion they should be.

"I don't expect them to be curious about me." one said.

Even if they wanted to be activists, give them a few sexy sound bites, a few Cliff notes, and they were good to go.

They don't know anything, not even academically, let alone experientially.

We're in trouble, folks.

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