OMG You So Stupid!

Ever hear people complaining that youngsters, especially American kids, can't identify such and such on a map?  Old people love to do this.  Then they wave that fact around like it proves the sad state of our knowledge of the rest of the world.

But that's not the problem.  The problem is, why can't people just read a freaking map?  There are words on most maps, right?  Ask me to identify Zimbabwe on a map.  Well there it is, under the word "Zimbabwe".  This seems more like a literacy problem than an ignorance problem.

If you took the words off a map, I couldn't identify the state of Delaware, let alone a tiny country on the other side of the planet.  Yes, I know which ones are Russia and China because they're big.  I know Australia because it's a continent with one country of the same name.  I know Italy because it's shaped like a stripper boot.  I know Canada because it's America's hat and Mexico because it's America's pants.  Beyond that, I'm mostly clueless.

Is a lack of geographical knowledge really so tragic in this day and age?  You can ask an old person to point to a country on a map, or you could ask a young person to do a google search.  In the time it takes the old guy to raise his boney, decrepit finger to point to the map, I could give you satellite imagery, road maps, and travel plans to anywhere in the entire world, and maybe even the moon.

I'm not saying Americans aren't ignorant of other cultures.  Hell, we went to war with Iraq because we thought it was the same thing as Afghanistan.  But really, who makes maps without words on them?  And, who would buy those maps?  Isn't that the point of a map?  To identify stuff?

 

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