Is it me or has this nation begun to embrace stupidity as a virtue? Is it no longer fashionable to be smart? It seems as though the people who are held up as heroes are often sports figures who make outrageous amounts of money to play a game, when the true heroes are often never heard from. You know the geeky kid everyone picks on at school? He’s called nerd, egghead, whiz kid, and it’s not a compliment. It seems like none of the kids going to school today really care about reading a book on their own and if they do, they are part of a separate society that nobody wants to know about. Who are the heroes of high schools? Is it the computer geniuses, the science whizzes, the members of the National Honor Society, the kids who take all the advanced placement courses? Not a chance, the heroes are the football jock and the cheerleader. We idolize the athletes and fashion models while the mental giants hardly get noticed. A concept I've been developing over the last few years (and was included in an E-book written by a friend of mine) is the Moron as Hero. Look at some of the role models we are given:
There are so many places where being stupid or ignorant seems more important than being smart. As a nation, it seems like many people love people who act and do things that are so incredibly idiotic; they make their own stupidity look intelligent. We seem to have a need to pull down anyone who seems to be ahead of us in brainpower. We idolize those who are clever in their ability to demean intellectualism rather than exalt it.
Who is it that makes the innovations we live on? Who figured out how to make a computer work over a network? Who keeps churning out hardware and software to make our computers faster and more efficient? Who designs the cellular telephones we suddenly “can’t live without?” It seems to me that the people we owe most of our societies advances on are not morons, they are technically competent and highly intelligent individuals who overcame the teasing and brutal oppression they received from their peers and created something out of nothing. The Thomas Edisons, the Albert Einsteins, the Frank Loyd Wrights, the Bill Gates, they all did what everyone said was impossible. Most of them weren’t successful in school. They made their marks anyway and whether we see them as villains or heroes, they are the ones who made the difference. We as a nation need to stop worshipping the dolt and start praising the innovator. Let us recognize and encourage genius, not ruthlessly squash it as “different.”