If you ran into a complete stranger on an American street, there’s a huge chance that the general lack of any political knowledge will make you extremely uncomfortable.
According to a variety of polls, nearly two-thirds of Americans can’t name a single Supreme Court justice. One percent could name all nine. Though 75 percent of us can quickly name the three stooges, only 42 percent can name the three branches of government. About one in every four Americans can name more than one of the First Amendment freedoms.
Perhaps the most tragic statistic yet: a solid 26 percent of us don’t know that we declared our independence from Great Britain.
I haven’t even brought up our lack of scientific knowledge or our hidden dashes of racism. Take for example the general American opinion regarding the summer’s heated debate about a proposed mosque in New York City. Apart from the scary fact that one-fourth of Americans think that our church-going Christian president is in fact a closeted Muslim, the racism toward Muslims was unnerving. About a third of us actually believe Muslims should be barred from running for the presidency or being selected to the Supreme Court.
I bring this up because we’re in the midst of an important election season. The November midterm elections will affect our political policies for the next few years. We also face a plethora of foreign problems and domestic issues.
Our political ignorance is nothing new. Similar statistics show that a majority of Americans in the 1990s and 1980s had trouble naming their representatives or the process of their government.
The problem this time is the fact that there’s just so much at stake. In order for our democracy to prosper, we need to ensure that we, voters, are properly educated about those running and the issues.
Rather than simply turn on the television and hear O’Reilly or Olbermann tell us what we should think, let’s take a step back and for once research these things for ourselves. Let’s contact our representative. Let’s see their voting records and finally understand or attempt to grasp the issues.
The future of our country and of democracy is largely dependent on our actions and, at the present time, we don’t deserve that awesome power. Let’s change that.