by Shelby  Curtis |

A few days ago I received an e-mail from a friend. I was dumbfounded as I read about a lady who was on the show, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? and got the simplest of questions wrong. When asked, “what object is bigger, a peanut, an elephant, a car or the moon?” she actually took a minute to think about it, then proceeded to use all three of her lifelines. Even after her friend and the audience told her to choose the moon, she went with her gut instinct and chose an elephant.

This got me thinking about our American culture. If someone was visiting from a foreign country and that was the first thing they saw on TV, what would they think? Is it possible that because of what we’re constantly showing on television, things like Jersey Shore and Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, that we could be the laughing stock of the world? Think about it. I have met many kids my age from Germany, France, and even Brazil, visiting America, and every time I speak to them it’s in English. I then find out that in almost every case, they not only speak their native language, they speak three other languages.

Why is it that I have had three years of Spanish and all I can say is hola and gracias or that one of my best friends didn’t know if the president was a republican or a democrat? Something is terribly wrong here. We’re a major world power and our general intelligence level does not seem to reflect that, especially as shown on TV. Maybe the problem lies in the fact that the phrase “ignorance is bliss” is really common in America, and maybe we’ve been living by that standard for too long. Let’s just hope that if other people are judging us Americans based on what they see on TV, they watch Big Bang Theory before they find out who Snooki is.