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America –Again



I must be a glutton for punishment but my wife and I are just back from a trip to America.  Again the wedding of the daughter of a friend of my wife, and so we went to Georgia for five days. 

We landed in Atlanta, and the whole process was as unpleasant as it had been in the past.  Many questions about why we were in the US, and that I appear to go to the US very often.  They did not like our home address, somehow they still have issues with addresses in the UK.  Still after an hour, we made it into the country.

Weddings are weddings, they change and they look different. Some of it is cringing, but there’s a rhythm to the things and usually by 1 AM you’re done.  We underestimated the welcome we received in Georgia.  To be perfectly honest, the entire weekend was lovely. Both my wife and I stayed away from any political conversation. Nevertheless, we were both surprised by the ignorance of the people of the party, in particular the young ones. I have no understanding of the US educational system. You always see these YouTube videos where some stupid beach bunny is asked for the name of the capital of the United States, and says New York. You assume that these are outliers. I’m afraid that is not at all the case.

We had a conversation about the metric system if you can believe it, mainly because I told my wife that it was around 21° in the room, a bit too cold for us. He was literally a conversation between myself and my wife, yet some young guy took me to task because the metric system was incomprehensible, and why did the British not do like the rest of the world and use the American system. For clarification, he actually meant the imperial system which came out of Britain, but there was really no point in correcting the young man who seemed convinced that the entire world was using the imperial system, or as he called it the American system.

The young man was of no real political persuasion. He didn’t sound like a republican, he sounded like an idiot. And yet, this idiot had gotten an engineering degree out of Georgia Tech. I have no idea what they teach an American university, but to think that you could do your engineering degree using the imperial system in the 21st-century is gobsmacking.  The overall surprising thing about that party, which was a lot of fun, was the ignorance about general and common facts. The inability to understand that virtually every country in the world aside from the United States uses the metric system. It’s just an easy example.

My point is that the level of ignorance I saw among these 20 something year-old people who would be considered to have a good education was surprising. It may explain why so many of them believe almost any fact presented to them, because they lack the curiosity and the tools to understand the real world. It is shocking to think that America is run by ignorant people. There has to be a price to pay for this, I just don’t know what the price is.


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