Ignorance IS NOT Bliss, It IS Dangerous
The phrase "Ignorance is Bliss"' originated in Thomas Gray's poem 'An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College'. published 1747. The complete line was "... where Ignorance is Bliss, 'Tis Folly to be wise.'" That perspective is aligned with Toby Keith's song lyric, "I wish I didn't know now, what I didn't know then." But that simplistic innocence is not what the US is dealing with in this hostile enivironment across our nation that has been driven by T**** and the pathetic GOP that doen't have the courage to standup to his maliciousness in the fear of losing the support of his mentially-ugly, ignorant followers.
In the 4 years of the T**** administration, ignorance had established an unprecedented threshold of terror across the U.S. population. It has been demonstrated in so many ways as to those individuals that are some combination of poorly educated, racial and religious biased upon nuturing by ignorant parents, to pathetic individuals that are incapable of finding meaning in life other than taking down those who can, and lastly those that fatuously believe their 'sense' of failure is not their fault. The shamefull, horrific, and neurotic Trump was able to capitalize on that basis of ignorance that has been present in our society to some extent forever. But asshole T**** then indirectly and directly mushroomed it to a major threat to safety across the nation. However, it has not been an actual threat to our democracy framed by the Constitution I believe- I hope. Thank God. I say this perhaps naively, but I have experienced, indirectly as a visitor, a true revolution, insurrection, in Egypt short of a decade ago. This pathetic, shameful act on January 6th is but a pitence of iEgypt's situation that should not truly challenge the strength of our democracy, that is if our leaders on both sides, primarily GOP, would have the guts to state and demonstrate right from wrong.
But what about those mentally-ugly, ignorant individuals. I truly beleive that the numbers are not really that great as the coward politicians fear. What these folks require is leadership to provide the proper direction of morality, decency, and respect for the democracy driven by the people. That is, we have the horses determining the direction of the wagon, and the driver is to weak to drive the horses in the proper direction. A proper driver can set the direction. I truly believe that Biden is the man to do that, but that will require reasonableness on part of the GOP.
To be clear as to my standpoint, being ignorant is not only correlated to the lack of education. Indeed, I know too many individuals that are well educated that are in fact ignorant in some fashion relative to the degradation of decency in our country. Other factors, as mentioned above, are 1. the horrible nuturing by horrible parents that find superiority over others that are of a different race, religion, and/or sexual orientation, 2. placing personal wealth as THE driving force above morality, and 3. a lack of natural, human decency in dealing with others. I recall a phrase a past minister of mine stated. "Too many of us have enough Love of ourselves to find difference from others, but not enough love to find acceptance of others."
I have had fortunate opportunities via my professional and personal travel experiences of dealing with other cultures as well as the religions of those populaces, most notalbly Islam and to a lessor extent Buddhism. As a WASP raised in the blue collar, steel mill environment of Pittsburgh, I was indeed a babe-in-the-woods when I first travelled to Egypt, Kazakhstan, Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Hong Kong, versus my "vanilla' travel throughout Europe, Brazil, and Argentina. I was well aware of the "Ugly American" perspective that existed in the last part of the 20th century , and I have been overly conservative in not presenting myself that way. BTW, the Chinese have now taken on the UGLY perspective across the globe - they are universally horrible tourists.
Maybe if GOP aligned with the facts, instead T****'s followers' BS, many would come arount and recognize the courage of their representatives.