POLLS show that most Americans believe that President John Kennedy’s assassination was the product of conspiracy, despite the complete lack of evidence (Wikipedia).
Although there’s very little useful to say at a time like this – when a former president and presidential candidate is shot – that’s useful, there’s talk a-plenty.
I don’t have any blazing insights into why it happened, why those in charge of security allowed a rifleman within a football field’s distance at an open-air event or why some of the most virulent – and destructive – comments that followed were full of the most bat-spit crazy conspiracy theories since Pizzagate, which I thought could never be topped for brazen leg-pulling.
This crud has inundated social media, especially X (formerly Twitter) with stuff that would make Mephistopheles blush for bold-faced hooey.
And yet some of the nimrods that post this stuff get millions of “likes” and clicks. One sometimes gets the discouraging feeling that there’s a thick slice of the adult world that has grown up physically but never advanced emotionally or intellectually past hallway gossip or locker room taunts.
I do no want to blame this on our educational systems; we have them spinning in circles trying to cope with with a hundred different demands.
But, if by some magic, I could push one topic to the top of the agenda, ahead of coding, STEM, wood shop, literature (Melville and your whales, be gone!) and competitive cheerleading, it would be “critical thinking.” How to sort out the provable truth from the horse-hockey. How to expect that opinions arrived at and decisions made have some basis in fact and reality. Put that on the high school exit exam. Make that class mandatory every year, just like P.E. used to be.
Of course, that will never happen. Our logical capacities have been battered to the point that it’s easier just to swallow ideas whole, without reading the warning label, or the expiration date.