I may have to start writing two columns a week instead of my usual one. There is just so much to discuss. Here I was situated to write about the craziness going on with our border patrol agents and had done some research on several events when what happened’
The world stopped because of a death. I mean literally stopped.
In case you’ve been hibernating in a cave, or in a coma, you may ask what international politician may have passed on or what world wide religious figure died’
The answer would be, none of these.
The correct answer is Anna Nicole Smith died.
Who’
Well, to avoid any legal issues here that might arise if I were to describe this
person, let me just suggest that you use your own computer to research her. Then you can make your own assessment as to whether her life and death is worthy of world wide media coverage over the past couple of weeks.
We now have, at last count, some five or six men showing up to claim they are the biological father of her latest child. Memorials and services have sprung up all over the country to honor her. The media has been in a feeding frenzy over every detail of her life and legal issues surrounding her death.
This morning, two weeks after her death, the courts are still arguing over who can have custody of her body and possession of her daughter. Last night on some talk show a video was apparently played of Ms. Smith painted as a clown and talking nonsense to a baby carriage. The general comments were that she appeared to be drugged and the byline of one of the online columns makes the statement that ‘she loses any of the dignity she had left.
I’ m sorry, but the word ‘dignity’ and Anna Nicole Smith do not go together in my mind. Perhaps I’ m out of touch with what is happening in the world of today. If so, then please Lord, let me stay that way.
We have become a nation of voyeurs. We are more concerned over the gruesome details of some entertainment personality and her sordid life than we are over the events that govern our very destinies. How sad for us as a nation.
There was news of a recent survey last week about the answers to American history questions posed to college students. Not high school, not dropouts, but college students. Over 50% of them could not identify where these lines originated:
‘ We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
They did not know these were from our Declaration of Independence. They could, however, identify a picture of Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton. How sad.
By the way, the Declaration of Independence lists only 3,090,000 web references to it.
I ‘ Googled’ Anna Nicole Smith and came up with 56,700,000 references to her. That’s 56 million. I did the same for George Bush, the current President of the United States and came up with 65,000,000 references. Ms. Smith trails by only 8,300,000 references. What does this say about our national sense of conscience’
Paris Hilton, another darling of the media logs in 42,200,000 references.
Abraham Lincoln (for those of you who may still be in college and don’t know that he was the 16TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES) has an abysmal 3,560,000 references to him. 40,000,000 less than Ms. Hilton. In my mind, and I hope yours, I do believe President Lincoln was more important to our country than Ms. Smith or Ms. Hilton, combined.
I tend to turn off the television when some of the late night comedy shows do their ‘ man on the street’ interviews. I keep saying to myself that perhaps these people have been paid to act this stupid and ignorant. It should be disgraceful to all of us that we have people living in this great country of ours who cannot identify photographs of the leaders of our country, but can instantly identify some person who recently sang a song on ‘ American Idol.’
What does this say to the rest of the world about our values and our mindset’
Please explain to me how people less fortunate than those of us in this country can look to us for help and assistance, when it appears the majority of our citizens are more interested in finding out who is the father of some illegitimate child than they are with the President of the United States’
I’ m sorry, but I think Thomas Jefferson (the 3rd PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES and father of the Declaration of Independence) would find these current events very distressing.
By the way, Jefferson is 30,000,000 references behind Anna Nicole Smith.