Apparently, Donald Trump's wife lifted a few lines of her own speech from Michelle Obama's 2008 speech when Trump's wife spoke at the RNC earlier in the week. I didn't see it happen because I am just not interested in either convention this year. But I didn't need to see it happen because there have been literally thousands of memes and posts about it on my social media feeds. I try to ignore the posts and get to more interesting stuff, but people just cannot let the shiny thing go away.
See, when a dolt like Trump doesn't understand that plagiarism is bad (especially when you are plagiarising the wife of the guy you have been publicly attacking for months), then that is just par for the course. I would have understood if his wife's speech had caused a nice uproar on social media for a few hours, but it really should have died down after that. But it hasn't died down. Do you know why? Because this country is just like a child that is distracted by a shiny thing. We will keep chasing that shiny thing until a new shiny thing comes along.
I am sure that Trump's speech will be the next shiny thing, but probably for all of the wrong reasons. Trump will say another 7/11 thing and social media will run with it for days. Meanwhile, the parts of Trump's speech that indicate that he has no clue about international diplomacy or how a federal budget work will go unnoticed.
If anyone can honestly monitor social media for a few days and still question why this country needs to make 2-year college degrees available to everyone, then I don't know what to tell you. By 1870, elementary level education was made free to everyone in the United States. It wasn't until the 1940s that secondary education had become readily available to most Americans. When people were given access to free high schools, things suddenly got a little better in these here United States. The next logical step is to make 2-year degrees free to everyone.
We can move around tax revenue and create new corporate taxes that are a long time coming and give everyone a free 2-year college education. The result of everyone having access to 2-year degrees would pay that tax money back several times over. The country as a whole would not be so ignorant, and we could actually become an intellectual factor in the world again. But, hey! Isn't that the idea from that socialist fella! Hey! Socialism is bad! Fox News told me so! No way! Let everyone pay for their education! This attitude is exactly why this country still gets distracted by shiny things, and it will only get worse.
The state of education in this country is really sad, especially if you had watched some of those town hall meetings the candidates held earlier in the year. I cannot even begin to count how many cliches there were saying cliche things that they got from memes on social media or from people with agendas on the 24-hour news networks. But that is 'Murrica! And apparently, that is the way we like it.
Watch the movie Idiocracy. That is where we are headed if we don't do something soon. If we don't take the next logical step and make 2-year degrees available to everyone, then we will continue to have generations of people walking off cliffs while chasing imaginary monsters on their phones. That movie was supposed to be a comedy, not a prophetic documentary.
But, I guess we like being distracted by shiny things. That is the way it is around here. Those of us who can see the country taking a nosedive can only sit by and watch as everyone else giggles like idiots for days and days over something that is really not that substantial in the first place.
So go chase your shiny things, America. Maybe Niantic will make an app for you that will help you chase shiny things off cliffs all around the country and do the rest of us a favor.
Maybe.
George N Root III is a miserable old man who is not distracted by shiny things. Follow him on Twitter @georgenroot3, or send him a message at georgenroot3@gmail.com.
