We Better Hope We Can Fix Stupid

I'm angry. Really angry.

I just watched an amazing National Geographic Channel ("Nat Geo" for the cool people) documentary called "Nazi Scrapbooks From Hell." One scrapbook featured - the personal photo album of a Nazi officer while he was adjutant at Auschwitz - was found by an anonymous Allied soldier after the war and was eventually mailed to the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

Another scrapbook - called the Auschwitz Album - contains the only surviving photo evidence of the selection and preparation of Jews for the gas chambers. It was found by a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz as she was recovering from typhoid after the liberation. Housed in a former SS bunkhouse that had been turned into a hospital, she opened a drawer one night in the hopes of finding a blanket and instead found the photo album. In that album, scattered in shots of the crowds piling off the trains, were photos of her family - including brothers, aunts and grandparents -arriving at Auschwitz. She was the only member of her family selected to work instead of go straight to the gas chambers that night, and the SS officer's scrapbook contained the only surviving photos of her family. It is now in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.

So why am I so angry (other than the fact that six million men, women and children were treated worse than animals and demonically slaughtered)? According to the latest study of the basic history knowledge of 17-year-old American high school students, nearly 25 percent don't know who Adolf Hitler was. Half of them have no idea what the Renaissance was - probably the same half that also can't identify the correct half-century of the Civil War.

Given that there are about 3 million U.S. high school seniors, that means 1.5 million people who are about to vote in the next presidential election don't have a basic understanding of U.S. or world history. And, about 750,000 have no idea who one of the most evil men ever to walk the Earth was (yeah, I know Stalin killed 20 million, but if they don't know Hitler, how many of them do you think actually know who Stalin is? That's just hoping for too much.)

I seriously feel sick. What in the heck are we teaching our children? I bet 99 freakin' percent of them could identify Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. I bet they could tell you the latest plotline for "Gossip Girl" or what the hottest new Wii game is or who won the last season of "American Idol," but they can't tell you basic facts about our country or our history or even our most notable lapses in humanity.

This is not going to end well, people. George Santayana was right (about this, anyway) - those who cannot remember history are indeed doomed to repeat it. Normally I'm a pretty optimistic person, but my optimism is being replaced with a growing sadness that we as a people have lost our way - we've lost that drive for excellence, that desire to learn and the respect for common sense that defined us as a nation and made us the envy of the world...and I don't think we even care to fix it anymore. I don't think our enemy is a terrorist organization or rogue country attacking us, I think we're doing a damn good job destroying ourselves, and our enemies are just sitting back waiting for it all to fall apart.