After two days, I'm still a little depressed about this.......

[Snagg]

I was in a drug store Monday evening (the 20th - hint, hint), and while filling out the check the perfectly nice young female clerk helpfully offered the day's date.

I told her, "Thanks, but I knew that one. Big Trivia Fan here."

First Bad Sign: Her reply - "Huh?"

I drew a breath and asked her if she knew what world-famous event had occurred on that day, forty years earlier, that was the cause of newspaper reports and tv segments and talk radio debates and internet alerts and god knows what all else.

She gave me that look that you get when you show a card trick to a dog. Total befuddlement, a nervous sense that she was supposed to be more excited but didn't know why.

I told her that forty years ago that day, mankind landed on the moon for the first time.

Another "What?"

I tried one last time. "Neil Armstrong? 'One Small Step For Man, One Giant Leap For Mankind'? Apollo 11? The human race set foot on another heavenly body for the very first time?"

She stared at me for a few seconds, and then burst out guffawing and said " Get outta here! We ain't been to the MOON! That's just Crazy!!"


Now. I'm aware that ignorance knows no age or intellectual divide. I know quite clever people that are still totally unaware of some things that one would expect almost anybody living in the Information Age to be cognizant of - Like, that if it's the middle of the afternoon here, then it's the middle of the night on the other side of the planet. I know people in management positions who are under the impression that the ENTIRE UNIVERSE re-sets it's clock every time we switch back and forth from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. I'm real good at staring at somebody who's said something that dumb with an unnervingly blank expression until they get flustered and go away.

But...Doesn't a perfectly content stranger not even knowing that we've been to the Moon make any of you just a tad...sad? These are the folks that are going to inherit the planet, and it made me morose. Just how ignorant and uninformed is acceptable these days?

[Sally White]

I received a wonderfully dumfounded and incredulous look when asked the other day, had I seen the special on TV about the Moon Landing. "Actually," I said, "I watched it the first time."

[Snagg]

By no means am I suggesting that this (or any other) generation are a collective intellectual sinkhole. In fact, when I got home from the drugstore, I called my very bright daughter and told her how proud I am of that head on her shoulders as well as her eagerness to use it.

It's just sad to consider how much some of them are missing in the world.

But I'm being presumptuous. For all I know, that clerk may be able to speak four languages and can do Boolean algebra in her head. There simply might be a fat blind spot in her general knowledge of the world...

[Sarge!]

Gee will ya look at that I made a contextual error in my previous post. I'm slipping......

[Sarge!]

Look on the bright side Snagg your listener could have come back with a pithy reply that the moon landing was made up by the NASA. That it was all a set created by Hollywood. I don't know which is better or scarier the ignorant or the stupid...

[Snagg]

I know, I know....Sometimes it's just...embarrasing to remember than I was once Young and Stupid, I guess.

But even I never held up a Beatles album in a record store and told my equally vacuous friend "LOOK! Paul McCartney had a band before Wings!" That's a True Story, by the way....

[stillgoing]

I'm currently reading a book called the Dumbest Generation. Its point is that the current teens and twenty year olds are so enamored and distracted by all the technology; twitter, text, cell phones, emails, etc. That they don't have time or inclination to see anything but now. They are destined to repeat all the historical mistakes once again. Eve, put that apple down....stupid bitch.

[Dazzling Zoomer Gal Diana]

Gosh. I thought we were all collectively onto the next topic, which would be "Did we really go to the moon, or was it a hoax?" Oh my. Next time you see this young lady, you might ask her if she thinks the world is flat. You know, just casually slip it into your conversation . . . /;->