Knowing and thinking you know

http://www.newmediajournal.us/guest/e_jeffers/02012007.htm

While reading this thoughtful and insightful article, this section started me thinking.

"In a year, I will be thrust back into society from a life and mentality that doesn't fit your average man. And then, I will be alone. And then, I will walk down the streets of America, and see the yellow ribbon stickers on the cars of the same people who compare our President to Hitler. I will watch the television and watch the Cindy Sheehans, and the Al Frankens, and the rest of the ignorant sheep of America spout off their mouths about a subject they know nothing about."

One day my parents pulled over by the side of the road and picked up a hitchhiker. It was 1979 and we lived in Rhodesia. The hitchhiker was an Oxford student come to see how viciously evil the pariah state was. Well, from the moment he started talking, thats what we understood his views to be. There are levels of ignorance- this young man was not at the lowest level. He had read a lot, and had bothered to travel to this place he had such strong views about. But its interesting to me that both my parents, who had shared many of his opinions when we first moved to Rhodesia in 1975, disagreed with him rather hotly now. I could tell that they were annoyed by how imperiously and innacurately he judged things because he just didn't know what he was talking about. And at 19 (or whatever), most people aren't very good at working out how much there is they don't know.

Fortunately, we grow up, and gradually we realise how great a gulf there is between the natty slogans of people like Sindy Sheehan and the young Oxford student; and the great teeming world with all its quiet, significant truths. Well, some of us do. Other people, like Michael Moore, Senator Edward Kennedy, Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn stick with the natty slogans and a world as thin and simple as veneer. Debates between the veneer people, and Sergeant Eddie Jeffers, the author of words above, are pretty much useless. Sgt Jeffers has been through an intense and stressful speed-learning course, run (unintentionally) by the US Army in Iraq. Simply by being a soldier in that harsh and hostile place has taught him things that will never be erased from his mind; that he could never have aquired in any way but this way; and that have given his world a depth and subtlety entirely absent from the sloganeers one back home. It brought him into daily contact with people utterly unlike himself, and forced him to enter their world, at least to some extent.

Just like the young Oxford student, the sloganeers are very happy with their current state of knowledge. They believe they know everything they need to know- but what is missing? With Iraq, it seems, everything is missing. We all remember the recent Democrat appointee to the Senate Security Committee who didn't know whether Al Qaeda were Sunni or Shia. Thats the tip of a very large iceberg of ignorance. When it is willful ignorance, we should be very harsh. And a bright light must be shone on the subjects that the veneer-people just can't be bothered to acquire real information about.