Richard’s Notes

Does anyone with an education reading this actually believe that Obama is a muslim? Better yet, does anyone with an education reading this believe it would be a problem (for you) if Obama was of the Muslim faith?

People without an education don’t have the tools to filter out the noise and don’t have the worldview to understand that just because some of the folks who flew planes into buildings were Muslims, not all Muslims want to fly planes into buildings.

An education allows some of us to filter out the noise (flag pins, etc.) and just get the signal. You can stereotype that attribute as “elite” but I’d rather have it than not.

There are people all over the US (not just in WV and KY where they are concentrated) who don’t have the tools to filter out the misinformation and there are other people who use that fact in a divisive way. We expect Limbaugh and others like him to do this. We don’t expect it from Democrats and certainly not from Hillary or Bill Clinton.

I’d much rather see Obama work on educating these folks rather than bending to get their votes, but in fact no matter how he did it they would no doubt look at him as some uppity black man, how dare he have a brain and think about things in more complex ways than they do. His speech on race was brilliant but how many people without an education actually heard it and if they did, how many of them actually got it?

As Michael Douglas said (and Aaron Sorkin wrote) in The American President:

“America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship…”

I keep watching this movie to see this speech, I love it.

A few of the prerequisites for “advanced citizenship,” it would seem to me, are literacy and education. Throwing education under the bus is a very bad idea.