If you want to know why the fearmongering of the Bush administration works, you don’t have to look at a lot further than this:
Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.
While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper.
But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer.
Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.
The answer lies in the fact that we just are not all that smart. We continue to suffer from poor education, voter apathy, misinformation from the press, and a deliberate policy of instilling fear by the government.
This isn’t even a matter of a recent deterioration of our public schools, because the worst offenders in the poll are elderly Americans. I suppose they can remember more years and have a harder time pinpointing which year 9/11 happened in. How about the five percent that couldn’t identify what day 9/11 occurred on? That reminds me of a Final Jeopardy where the answer was, “Napoleon’s first name” and no one got the question, which would have been, “What is Napoleon?”
I guess five percent thought it was a trick question.