Disease of Ignorance

Communication, what does it mean to you? Could you survive without it or is it like an insatiable drug that controls your every move; is it something that you should pull away from and seek help to cure yourself from the disease? I believe it could be both depending on the circumstance, depending on who you are trying to communicate with, depending on the topic of your conversations. The words you speak can both uplift you and project your life into a whole new world of magnificence or they can cast you down into the chasm of darkness leaving you lost in doubt.

This is my problem with ignorance; there are some out there in this world who choose to live without knowledge, and simultaneously believe that they know it all. They think that they have already learned everything that there is to know and just simply stop searching; all the while they cannot seem to even form a complete sentence let alone properly communicate. It drives me to madness seeing such a young capable youth doing absolutely nothing with his/her life; I suppose they get by from day to day, but why would you want to limit yourself from the greatness that this life has to offer? I am a firm believer that in order to succeed and gain that greatness you must always be asking questions, searching for answers, be constantly hungry for the unknown, always attempting to broaden your horizons.
I was working with an individual today who was trying to spark my interest by playing me some of the music he likes by pulling up videos on youtube. The one song I actually sat through sounded like fingernails being drug down a chalkboard in my head, I watched as the lyrics were spelled out on the screen; they went something like this: “I aint got no keeedz in mah house, hell naw” (repeated roughly 12 times) and then there were various racial slurs being shouted by the group jumping around the rap “artist”.

Now, I’m not here to say what you should or should not listen too, and I am certainly not here to tell you what you should or should not like; I am not you and everyone is different. However, I will ask you the question, how in great blue hell is trash like this being signed and by the great beard of Zeus why are people actually listening to it? You know the saying ‘you are what you eat’? Well, the same goes for your brain, my friends. You let garbage in and you will regurgitate those thoughts out in the forms of word vomit and ignorant actions, and yes, actions can also be ignorant.
So, I go back to my first question; what does communication mean to you? I am here to say it is EVERYTHING! If we lost our ability to communicate with one another this world would fall apart; and when I say communicate, I mean effectively communicate. I hear kids walking around the mall and nothing but Ebonics is spilling from their lips and I wonder what the future generations are really going to bring. Of course you can’t judge the entire population of today’s youth just because a few are willfully ignorant, however, it’s a big enough problem to be noticed and I for one think there needs to be a major change in the mindsets of these young adults.

The big question is, how? Promote reading and good music for starters; for instance: if you like rap, listen to artists who actually have something to say rather than someone who writes two lines and turns it into a five minute song. There are plenty of poets out there who contribute their talents to the world of music, seek them out. As far as reading goes you should read anything and everything. Find what sparks your interest and find something that doesn’t, and read it anyway. There is a world of knowledge out there and in today’s world it is just a click away. So how about it? Does anyone else want to kill the disease of ignorance?