In his commencement address, Sunday, at Hampton University, Virginia, President Obama told the students that information and acting upon that information, was the key to a successful democracy:
“What Jefferson recognized… that in the long run, their improbable experiment — called America — wouldn’t work if its citizens were uninformed, if its citizens were apathetic, if its citizens checked out, and left democracy to those who didn’t have the best interests of all the people at heart.
“It could only work if each of us stayed informed and engaged, if we held our government accountable, if we fulfilled the obligations of citizenship.”
In what is as rare as Robert Gibbs’ ability to provide a lucid and logical explanation as to what the administration’s policy on terror man made events is, I agree with President Obama.
As you read stories of our country’s founding, you will find that even then, with the relatively rudimentary communication tools, at least as compared to today, information and debates about that information were key to the success of nearly every endeavor of the nation. Most especially one can see the import that information and debate had on the nation’s founding if you study any of the history of the creation and ratification of the Constitution.
Flash forward to today and you see information having the same place as the corner stone in democracy. While the tools for disseminating it have changed, information and the debate of information, remains the key to our democracy. One only need look at “leaders” like Hugo Chavez and how they all attempt to control the flow of information as one of their first acts, to understand how important information flow is to a free people. Can anyone imagine how a movement without structure could have the impact that the tea party is having, if it didn’t have access to and the means to distribute information in a free and rapid fashion?
Earlier in his speech, President Obama complained about
arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter.
He added:
With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.
Really? Information becomes a distraction? I guess that might be true if your goal was not debate but to dictate “truth” and “fact” as you want it to be seen. In that case, conflicting information would certainly be a “distraction.” However, in any honest assessment of an issue, debate, which nearly by definition, means disagreement is the best way to find answers. Not to go all Biblical on you this early in the week but have you never heard of iron sharpening iron?
Unfortunately, with a political life that was forged in Chicago, President Obama is used to avoiding debate and only hearing the comforting, echoing applause of support for every socialist idea he puts forth. “Information” in President Obama’s world is just one more distraction on his way to a “transformed” America.
One last thought…in light of his comments and his knock on the newest information and technology gadgets, has anyone informed the President that we are an information age economy? Oh, my mistake, I was assuming for a moment that a robust economy was something that the President would want.
