I don’t really blame people for being ignorant. I blame myself. I didn’t teach enough. I think of me as we, we teachers. We didn’t teach enough. How else to explain it?

I don’t even want to give the excuse, that when people grow up they should take responsibility for their own ignorance. They don’t know enough to do that.

And the Internet. It’s there for everyone. It has almost, I did say almost, all of the knowledge there ever was. It’s there for everyone, even for someone as ignorant about it as I am.

But it also has everything else. It has all the ignorance manifest, well, almost all, it’s still working on it. There’s so much, every truth and every lie.

But you need to be smart enough to navigate your way through. Aye, there’s the rub. Even Hamlet would have his problems with the Internet, subdivide as you will.

And once the Internet gets its hooks into you, it won’t let you go. You’re a goner. It draws you in and you’re trapped. I think we need to prepare ourselves ahead.

And that’s where I/we come in again. I come from the old days when people could read. Even the Internet expects a minimal competence. If we teach people to read, encourage them, if, dare I say it, get them to think, teach them how but not what, then maybe.

I say maybe because I’m not naïve enough to not know some of the possibilities. I plunge on with questions like why? Why not?

Something concrete, specific, would be in order right about now.

I encourage everybody to read the old Kornbluth story The Marching Morons. Wake up from stasis brings the grifter protagonist into a world very much like our own now. Overbreeding morons with an average IQ of 45 are pushing the world to the over populated edge of the extinction of the human race while the small number of the intelligent are overburdened with the demands of running things. They turn to the protagonist for a solution. He agrees to help with the proviso that he be made Dictator for life. The plan convinces people to sign up to move to Venus where land is cheap. They’re loaded onto rockets and launched into the ocean. The protagonist is hoisted with his own petard and loaded onto the next rocket. They’re cleaning house.

That’s a brutal way to save the world and protect the future.

But read the story. It will give you a laugh but parallels to now from that long ago.

It just might make you think.