Tuesday, November 09 2004: 6 yr old's rant
So, there I was sitting in the "Ruby Tuesday's" in Charles Town
minding my own business, waiting overlong for the frazzled waitress to
bring the check when I'm suddenly shockingly aware of what this little girl
sitting at the table behind me is ranting about. The word that caught my
attention was abortion.
"No you heard wrong, there's no earthly reason for a 6 year to be
talking about abortion..."
But, no I was wrong. She was railing against the evils of a abortion rights.
She then went on to squawk about how terrible it was that "there are
these people in Washington that want to take 'under god' out
of the Pledge. It's just insane. These people are mentally ill."
It's the proliferation and inculcation of this kind of completely uncritical, reason-free
thinking that leads me to believe this world will never be right.
We have these gigantic cerebra that we've spent some 2 million years
evolving, but we'd rather confine our discourse to reactions that could
just as easily be regurgitated by some portion of the reptilian brain.
It could be said that I am blowing this way out of proportion, since the
child was only 6 or 7, at most, but the troubling thing is not that the
child was saying stupid things, but rather that at some points adults
(probably the adults at the dinner table) taught her those stupid things.
minding my own business, waiting overlong for the frazzled waitress to
bring the check when I'm suddenly shockingly aware of what this little girl
sitting at the table behind me is ranting about. The word that caught my
attention was abortion.
"No you heard wrong, there's no earthly reason for a 6 year to be
talking about abortion..."
But, no I was wrong. She was railing against the evils of a abortion rights.
She then went on to squawk about how terrible it was that "there are
these people in Washington that want to take 'under god' out
of the Pledge. It's just insane. These people are mentally ill."
It's the proliferation and inculcation of this kind of completely uncritical, reason-free
thinking that leads me to believe this world will never be right.
We have these gigantic cerebra that we've spent some 2 million years
evolving, but we'd rather confine our discourse to reactions that could
just as easily be regurgitated by some portion of the reptilian brain.
It could be said that I am blowing this way out of proportion, since the
child was only 6 or 7, at most, but the troubling thing is not that the
child was saying stupid things, but rather that at some points adults
(probably the adults at the dinner table) taught her those stupid things.
