Dumbing down the election

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winner and senior fellow at the Nation Institute, argues that our political differences aren't so much red and blue, conservative and liberal, or Republican and Democrat. Instead, they're the difference between the educated and the illiterate. Those with the capacity to analyze and argue versus those influenced by propaganda:

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

And our candidates debate at a 7th to 9th grade vocabulary level, compared to the 11th and 12th grade levels of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Buy a book for your kids, for your siblings, for your friends. Buy one through the Amazon link here, and I'll buy more books for kids at LHS.