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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