Thoughts as the world comes to an end

So the buzz around the office and Internet is the Mayan prediction that the end of the world is coming in a few weeks. I get a kick out of the attention people give those wise, apex scientists the Mayans had a few thousand years ago.

Perhaps these same people get their knowledge of dinosaurs from old episodes of “Land of the Lost?” (Was it the Jurassic or the Cretaceous that saw the domination of the Sleestaks?) Personally, I would think the strongest signs that the end is near are the popularity of reality television and the existence of boy bands. Which begs the question: have we really become this gullible?

I read an article a few weeks ago wherein some scientists hypothesize that humans are actually becoming less intelligent as time marches forward. They believe that in contrast to several hundred or thousand years ago, when man had to use his intellect in order to survive, we now no longer face those challenges and hence don’t really exercise our brains anymore. I gotta say, I might believe that. Imagine pulling a man out of the far past, somehow explaining to him how smart and “advanced” we are, then showing him an episode of “Jackass.” Heck, imagine going back to the 1950s and letting them listen to Justin Bieber. You would truly see somebody weeping for the future.

Personally, I think this might have ties to the instant-gratification world we now live in. Sometimes it seems as though every teen and 20-something has attention deficit disorder. I grew up in the last generation where learning something meant looking it up! And no, I don’t mean clicking a button on the Internet. If we had to write a report, it meant mom or dad had to drive us down to the library to check out these marvelous things called books that we had to read and take notes on. A really good report might require an outline first. Try explaining that to anyone born after 1975. Either they laugh at you or they say something like, “Oh, that must have been awful!”

Oh my, yes indeed it was. Not having the answers to anything instantly at my fingertips and with a few clicks of a button was just pure misery. Oh me, oh my.

I must admit, this does give me a bit of grief raising my children. More than once I’ve grown frustrated with my boys when they were ready to simply give up and pack it in because they didn’t understand something instantly. Or, they weren’t enjoying a sport because they hadn’t rushed right out and become No. 1 within a week. It makes me want to pull my hair out.

Time and time again I’ve talked to them about my days of racing, karate, boxing, shooting wherein anything took time, effort and patience to learn. And it was understood that you weren’t going to be very good at something right away. You knew that it was going to take time and you had to pay your dues. You had to work, work and work some more to slowly get better. Most importantly, I’ve told them numerous times that in nearly every instance, the true value in achieving something was the hard work you had to put out to earn it. History and society shows us time and time again that when somebody is simply handed something valuable or powerful, it almost always ends in disaster. Only through earning it do we gain the respect it took to get it.

I sincerely hope it’s sinking in with my boys, because Lord knows the society we live in is working against me on this one. “I want it, I deserve it, give it to me now!” seems to be the new style.

One of the places I most easily spot the gullibility of this “now-now-now” attitude is in politics. Politicians are fully aware of the unwillingness of younger generations to look anything up, to fact check. Nowadays, you can simply spit something out and it becomes instant truth. Politicians have never been known for their honesty, but at least they had to be a little slippery about it.

Debates were an exercise in linguistic gymnastics where they would omit, twist or otherwise engage in wordplay. Not anymore. Nope, now they can stand at a podium and say, “I never said that” or “I never voted for that,” when all it would take is a few minutes to clearly see they are bold-faced lying. Imagine catching your kid with his hand in the cookie jar and he/she looking at you and saying, “My hand isn’t in the cookie jar.” It’s insulting!

The audacity in the lie is stunning, and even more mind-blowing is it works. So many people today can’t be bothered to take a few minutes to check on a voting record or even use their favorite toy, the internet, to search YouTube and see that politician saying exactly what he or she is standing in front of you denying having ever said. And these politicians are loving it, exploiting it more and more. They will sit in a debate and outright lie to each other and to you and I with the security of knowing that nobody is bothering to fact check. At most, we take the easy route and rely on the media to fact check it for us.

Oh yeah, that’s a great plan; let the unbiased and objective mainstream media do your (ahem) “fact-checking” for you. And all because each generation demands instant answers and instant gratification on everything. Headlines and sound bites are how they get their daily programming. Can’t be bothered with something if it’s going to take more than 10 seconds. Researching and reading is for suckers.

So back to where I started; naïve, glazed-eyed, spoon-fed gullibility. The idea that the human race is regressing in intelligence. Maybe. Maybe not. It was an interesting article, but I wasn’t able to find any additional information on the theory on Wikipedia so I stopped looking. It was taking too long.

Ben Compton is a Palmer resident and publishes his column as “Compton’s Corner,” the same title used by his grandmother, Phyllis Compton, a longtime Frontiersman columnist.