Shout It From the Rooftops ~ We're Ignorant and We're Proud

Back to bumper stickers. It has been raining for so long that I have spent much more time than usual sitting at red lights or at long lines of cars where lanes are blocked off, intersections under water, etc. So here's one that has been around a long time "My kid can beat up your honor student". Good grief. Since when has it become an American value to be violent and stupid. I know, many of you will say oh, that's been happening for a long time now. How sad is that? Certainly in politics we have seen that literacy and education have been conflated with arrogance and elitism. "Alright, so you got an education..you think you're better than me?" "Yep". I admit it, I am a snob, not an elitist, a snob. I believe that lifelong learning is a value to be cherished. Even if you don't have a formal education, there is always something to learn. There are so many ways in this technological world to educate yourself, to be interested, to be curious. I am not a snob about formal education. I am a snob about those who think they have nothing and no reason to learn. So sue me. Even in a job you don't love, you are bored by or just plain want to change, there is something new to learn. One of the great joys of living another day is that there is always something new to learn. It makes me nuts that I can't seem to instill this curiousity, this love of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, in my teenage son. I am just hoping its in there and will come out later when he passes through the hormonal fog to the other side. There was a woman where I work that couldn't make friends with her computer; I can really relate. But her solution, for the same problem over and over again, was to call IT for help, never learning her way to a better solution. Now I grant, we can't all be computer whizzes. But we can learn new things. To live in the world today we have to learn new things. I learned how to make a blog, at first so intimidating I thought I would kill myself. Now I have two. I have a touch phone. I was the woman with the oldest cell phone in America, a phone my son called the dinosaur. Even my dad, who's memory precludes him from a lot of technological learning, will sit at the computer and try. That's all it takes, Try. Like Ty Murray on Dancing with the Stars; he was still a bullrider but he had a lot of Try. We should not be proud of our children's ignorance, let alone our own. We should strive to find the teaching in every new day and shout that from the bumper.