Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of blabbering about issues that people don’t understand whatsoever. This article from Newsweek, for example, lists so many facts that the world knows to be true—evolution, for example, or the falsehood of the “death panels” that Sarah Palin pretty much invented along with whatever else she cackles forth now and then—that Americans seem to simply not believe in/believe in. It’s terrifying to me, for example, that about 1 in 5 Americans think that the sun revolves around the Earth.

Then I also recently watched some astonishing videos of the ludicrous “Restoring Honor” event that Glen Beck recently led and the amazingly stupid comments made by “tea party” people. A transcript here reveals that the new viral article from The Onion about the man who “learned all he needed to know about Muslims on 9/11” actually came from a real quote from this tea party member. I am dead serious—it’s in the transcript link.

The fact that these people—how to describe them? These uninformed, unquestioning, unbelievable people?—are out rallying for this or that without any real basis on what they say they believe in (when they can intelligibly say it; most of them are filled with empty rhetoric—“Take back our country! Mumble, mumble, mumble!”—and a lot of ums—is downright scary. And so much evidence presented that so many of them are simply racist is even scarier.

Look, I know everyone is entitled to have an opinion (just like one of the seemingly crazy people in the transcript above notes), but don’t you think you should at least have some knowledge to back that opinion up? I don’t know anything about cap and trade. Anything. So I have no opinion on it. Once I learn more, I will form an opinion. If you don’t know a damn thing about Muslims, or the president, or mosques, or science, or taxes, or pretty much anything going on in the world, why bother making yourself look that stupid in the first place? It’s like people going around saying, “Cats are the devil! People who have cats should be burned as witches, and if they survive the burning, we know they’re really witches!”

Oh, wait, we’ve been through that already. So why do we maintain this same mentality, again? Surely our grandchildren will look back on us with disdain for our lack of understanding and general sense. We’ve probably put their brains back a few evolutionary periods, so they’ll resent us as well.