Friday 3 March 2017

Thirty-six Sawtooth Stars



One of my college roommates was convinced that dinosaurs never walked the earth. She said we were gullible fools to swallow the fairy tales paleontologists feed us. “Have you ever been to a museum?” she’d ask, “The bones on display don’t even LOOK real.” Nothing we could say would sway her. She was a college student – a high school graduate making decent grades, even in her science classes. I think of her when I read about well-heeled and well educated moms who are afraid to vaccinate their children, or professional basketball players who insist the world is flat. They all remind me of something Isaac Asimov once said, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

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