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Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”
NYTimes article
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1 comment:
We all know that starting in elementary school and even into college, there's a certain stigma attached to kids who learn too much, read too much, discuss too much, philosophize. It's not cool to be smart. Likely most people are scared to be smart. Because then you have to do something with your knowledge/it's harder to be complacent.
In 2005 when I worked for the north metro newspaper publisher we unfortunately ran a weekly "Preacher's Corner" column written by a rotating cast of local (Christian of course) preachers. I remember one column. This preacher wrote to his readers/constituents that he would soon begin a master's course in theology. He noted that some in his community were skeptical about higher education. He proceeded to defend this decision to readers--he and his wife had deliberated, stayed up nights, etc., thinking about it, asking god, etc., and decided it was right for him to get a master's. And although his argument is correct, how retarded and frightening it is that he felt the need to justify further study to thousands of readers.
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