European Sensibility?
Posted By Kathleen David on September 29, 2016
This came out of a conversation I had at the bowling alley and some things I have been reading and responding to online.
It took me a while to sort out what they were talking about but it boiled down to my life experience, including travel all over the world, and that I am smart and observant.
I will never apologize for being smart. I was raised in a house of smart people with smart and clever people around. Being able to use your brain to solve something was considered a good thing and we were encouraged to do so.
I do the same with Caroline. I know she is smart and I want her to be proud that she can think rings around most of her classmates. I have taught her the fine line between smart and smart-ášš.
I have been trying to figure out when being smart became a bad thing. There is this weird attitude of well you are smart therefore I don’t have to listen to you because you are an elitist who doesn’t understand the problems of the common man.
And that’s the disconnect. Some were along the way smart became equated with not being able to understand the problems of regular folks. Which could not be further from the truth.
I have people in my town coming to me for information on something that they heard or read that they figure I probably have studied for years. I am one of the lucky ones that I read and retain really well so things I read back when I was in high school are still stuck in my head.
I am good at researching a topic and discovering all I can find on it. If there were a job that was just doing research for a company on various topics, I would excel. Caroline is showing the same kind of abilities. She also knows how to make her papers sound exceptional even if she is shaky on the topic at hand but she gets that from her dad.
I tend to try to look at an issue from more than one side if for no other reason than to be able to find cogent arguments that I can use if needed. It is an intellectual exercise to me. I also do various forms of mathematics in my head to go to sleep but that’s probably just me.
I enjoy brain-teasers and logic puzzles. I like things that make me use my brain and think both inside and outside the box. I am a problem solver to my core.
And I refuse to not be intelligent. I refuse to not question things that make no sense to me. I refuse to hide who I am because it can make people uncomfortable. I am me and I am an intellectual. Always have been and always will be.
I am grateful to my parents for teaching me that being smart was a wonderful thing to be.
I think smart became a bad thing under the George W. Bush presidency, when it was so obvious how incapable he was of understanding sooo much (from science to diplomacy) that the media had to run with the idea that it was more important for the president to be someone you’d like to have a beer with than someone who’s the smartest person in the room. It continued under Obama as global climate change became politicized, as a way to dismiss facts by sowing distrust in expertise. But it probably goes back, as so much does, to two media events: the advent of “news as profit center” and the popularity of reality shows where stupidity means big ratings.
Fascinating…
I made a comment, which evidently disturbed the sensibilities of the moderators, which has been deleted!
Yes, I am a scientist, with a masters in electrical engineering, and I do not ‘believe’ in AGW as portrayed in the media. I was too close to it during its formulation, and saw the beginnings of the hoax. The science has been manipulated for political gain to being totally unreliable, with biased ‘simulations’ and manipulated databases. It is too much to the advantage to the scientists involved to ‘toe the party line’ and release politically motivated ‘results’ and squelch any disagreement.
To be ‘smart’ in that area of scientific pursuit – make sure you predict a disaster, caused by human action. Any other result, and your career is toast!