As you read above, I believe that Americans are stupid. But more often than not, it is intellectual stubbornness and willful stupidity that make American people so ignorant. I will give you an example. A report shows that 7% of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. The fact that people believe this is horrific. Another common belief is that Africa is a country, when it is actually an entire continent made up of 54 independent countries.

Just to have an idea of how big Africa is, let us try to fit some countries into the African map. We could fit countries such as the U.S., India, UK, Japan, Germany and Spain to name a few and we would still have space remaining. Americans often reduce this huge continent to a country. Are they lazy, or do they just not know the difference?

The other aspect I want to talk about is willful stupidity, which likely stems from intellectual stubbornness. It is like our eyes and ears are open, but we refuse to acknowledge that what we see is contrary to our presumed beliefs. We are passive consumers of every bit of false information that comes our way. Many Americans have inaccurate media as their source for news and watch problematic television as a pastime. I think Americans often suffer from complacency, arrogance and pride. They think they know everything there is to know. The media is their gospel and pseudohistory is their truth.

For God’s sake, some people still don’t believe in coronavirus, yet countless lives have been lost. They called it a “hoax” and the vaccine a “threat”.

An American question that I find so tiresome and am fed up with hearing is when they ask someone wearing a hijab, “Don’t you get hot wearing that?” What does this even mean and why does it matter? If it is 90 degrees outside, I will feel the heat regardless of the choice of my wardrobe. That is just common sense. Honestly, what I have observed from Americans, as an American myself, is the contradictions of their beliefs. Americans would like to think they are open-minded and respectful of others beliefs and opinions, but this could not be any further from the truth. Today, we see people canceling each other on the basis of differences of opinions and beliefs. Where is the tolerance we pride ourselves on? And with our stubbornness in refusing to broaden our vision and learn, the ignorance of Americans is the product of this complacency.

Surveys about civics, history and even world maps render us useless. It is not that we don’t have education at our disposal, it is more so that we are willingly refusing to learn. We are a generation of nihilists who are too prideful to even learn about other people without first having a belief of superiority over them, fueled by the American identity.

We vote but we don’t know much about politics. Some people can’t even name the branches of government. The same people are the ones in denial about global warming. How can they explain hurricanes?

I think we are in a deep slumber that is harmful to the heart driven by our ego and pride due to our compounded ignorance — believing we know when we don’t know.