Intellectually Brain Dead

If there is one place I enjoy spending time, it is a bookstore. I remember when Barnes & Nobles opened their first few stores in Houston. The place was like a book palace. I hate to admit, I was one of those who quickly dumped my old favorite stores, such as Walden, for the new green giant with it's Starbucks or B&N Cafe. Books and coffee, I was intellectual heaven Whenever I made short instate trips to nearby cities I made sure I located a Barnes & Nobel so I could a day or an evening romancing the pages over coffee. And though I wasn't so impressed with the layout and design of the other super bookstore, Borders, you could still find me searching through their shelves also.

Compared to a lot of developing and underdeveloped nations, books are a luxury we take for granted. We in America don't really see them as an investment, for ourselves and our offspring, if we have any. Whether fiction or non-fiction, books are wonderful source of education and development.

Just after this past  Christmas I saw a post on Facebook that said something like this, "So you got money for Christmas. Will you use it to buy Jordans or books?"

How many people, adults as well as children, invested in something that would be of very little use to them in a few months, but never gave a thought to purchasing one book? I'm amazed when I ask parents and other relatives how many books they have purchased for their children that year and the answer is usually none. But how much money did they spend on shoes, clothes, toys and other things that will either be outgrown within months, lost, stolen, or broken?

Americans are investing very little these days in our intelligence, and some communities are suffering more than others from self inflicted ignorance poising. We blame the schools for their poor job of educating our children, but are parents doing anything to make up for the lack learning? Not every parent can send their children to a private or charter school. Maybe a family lives in a neighborhood where little government investment is being made in the schools. But a library card is still free, and they are filled with books for every age.

I saw another interesting Facebook post last year with a little boy, who appeared to very poor and maybe from an African country, holding a sign that read, "Turn off the Tv and pick up a book". Oh, if only more Americans would do that, and make it the norm in their household. We wouldn't have to sell our jobs to non-Americans. There would be very little need for imported workers in this country.

The reality is America's young generations (generation X - Millennial) are intellectually brain dead. We lack the knowledge of those who changed America in the 50s and 60s, our grandparents and great-grandparents generation. They were readers and we have become sleeping watchers, programed by the best of technology, often designed and created by a reading non-American.

Let's make lasting investments in our intellectual future. Let's pick up a few books and read them.