The Idiozation of America
Yesterday I finally fulfilled my only remaining requirement for my education specialist credential: I was re-certified in CPR and First Aid. While taking the class and watching the new videos put out by the American Heart Association, I couldn’t help but notice that the informative gentleman in the polo shirt on the television kept referring to two awkward-sounding terms: inside bleeding and outside bleeding.
Now I never went to medical school, but I’m fairly sure that that’s known as internal bleeding and external bleeding.
Doubtless one doesn’t need a college degree to attribute the correct meaning of these terms. But I learned that the American Heart Association has recently begun using the terms “inside bleeding” and “outside bleeding” for their CPR and First Aid classes, finally replacing those pesky academic terms “internal bleeding” and “external bleeding.” At long last! Who wants to memorize age-level appropriate words when they could just use words that a four year-old would use to describe such things (I apologize to many four year-olds in saying this)?
That’s when it hit me with fresh force: America is going through the process of what I am going to call “idiozation.” The powers that be decide that there needs to be an information or educational alteration that instead of challenging the American public, actually plays the information or education down to them. They meet in a board room and decide that instead of delving into correct terminology, wouldn’t it be simpler just to call it _(insert simplistic word/phrase here)_? And you know what? They do it and I’d guess the vast majority of Americans don’t notice or don’t care.
I struck again with this concept last night when I watched Obama’s address regarding raising the debt ceiling. Some of his first words put me on my guard “Now, I won’t bore you with the details, but…” Leapfrogging from that statement, which is to me, wrought with significant omissions, and delving headfirst into a “one side is right and one side is wrong” type of speech was disappointing. But, alas!, I digress. At least in the above matters I can do my own research to fill in more completely what those “details” he was referring to are.
We have certainly made progress as a nation. Instead of being passively fed information in intelligent, academic language, we are being passively fed information in patronizing language that insults most elementary school students I know! We consume it without thinking (naturally) and then wonder why our kids are doing so poorly in school.
Please remember this: when you see a guy that was so nervous for his job interview that he ended up breathing into a paper bag, he wasn’t hyperventilating; he was “fast breathing.”
Stay tuned for an even greater regression in the collective American intellect. Yet I still have hope…
The Sasquatch Soul: wandering, searching deeply, and avoiding photos. 
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