HOW IGNORANT ARE WE AS AMERICANS?

 It hit me right in the gut last night.  I was discussing our recent read, Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje (author of The English Patient), with my library book club and all of us agreed that we knew very little of the conflicts in Sri Lanka and have never heard them mentioned on any of the US news programs we watch or newspapers we read.  This is a pretty well-read, informed group, too.   

The book is powerful in portraying the horrors being played out in Sri Lanka so I did some research of my own.  If you Google “sri lanka, government, rebels”, you will see a slurry of recently filed reports from Italian, English, Indian, Australian, and other newspapers detailing the conflicts in Sri Lanka.  Some of the highlights include: 

 -          Sri Lanka has been embroiled in a civil was since 1983 (that’s 24 years) among mainly three groups – the majority Buddhist Sinhalese government, the Hindu Tamils in the north, and the anti-government forces in the south;

-          A cease-fire was brokered (mainly by the Norwegian government) in 2002, but this disintegrated in late 2005 and fighting has escalated ever since;

-          Prior to the cease-fire, over 65,000 people have died in the fighting; since the cease-fire has disintegrated, over 4,000 people have died (these counts are not accurate due to the secret kidnapping/disappearance of so many that cannot be accounted for); and,

-          The government has been cracking down on journalists (11 have been killed recently) and foreign diplomats have been hauled in and pressured to tow the “party line”. 

How could I not know anything about this?  Many of the reports I read on line were filed within the last 24 hours.  Why have I heard/read nothing about this in our news reporting?  I listen to NPR and watch public television news everyday, read papers and news magazines daily and weekly.

According to a 1994 Times Mirror survey (the only survey of its kind according to Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes in their 2006 book, America Against the World), Americans fared poorly compared to Europeans in following the news and in understanding it.  And when given a five-question current events test based on items then in the news, Americans ranked next to last among the eight transatlantic nations polled, trailed only by the Spanish.  More importantly, it pointed out that young Americans trailed British, Spanish, Italian, and German members of their generation in reading a newspaper and were the least likely to comprehend the international news that they had read. 

Is the answer that we cannot comprehend the news that we hear/read?  Or is it that the people making the decisions on what news is provided to us in the United States are so self-focused and ego-centric that they don’t think Americans care about what is going on in the world around us?  Can we all be that ignorant?  More importantly, can we afford to be that ignorant?