Tales of a coffee-holic: In the know?

I can find virtually any information with the touch of a button on my smart phone. I can learn about legal lingo, get weather updates and discover mundane facts about all my high school friends on Facebook in seconds.

Technology has made it a breeze to research any topic and to stay informed about current events. In theory, these advances should contribute to our overall knowledge as people, but in many cases, they do not.

Do most of us spend our time online in productive pursuits of knowledge about current events, politics or world news or do we spend an inordinate amount of time making memes so we can impress our friends, looking up celebrity gossip and checking Facebook? Sure discovering that you’re doing better than your high school rival is devilishly satisfying, but it’s not very productive.

I discovered last week that an alarming number of people I know personally had no idea who Nelson Mandela was. Not a clue. This both angered and saddened me. While the national news was buzzing over Mandela’s death, many people my age had no idea what was going on. In my opinion, everyone should learn the story of this civil rights activist and Nobel Peace prize winner who spent decades in prison for his work to bring equality to blacks and whites and who eventually became South Africa’s first democratically elected president.

In this age of instant information, we seem to seek out the most useless bits of it. Maybe the newspaper industry is struggling not because we can’t find the right system to charge people for content online, but because people aren’t interested in the news.

I’m not saying this problem is limited just to younger generations. Who’s to say our grandparents wouldn’t have been watching the Kardashians instead of the nightly news if they had the option? Maybe mindless drivel is what we feel we need to escape a stressful day at work, but it’s not what makes us good people.

How can we claim that America is the best place in the world (as we all do) if we know next to nothing about what’s going on in the rest of the globe? Both struggle and success occur constantly across our country and elsewhere. Many of our citizens are woefully uninformed about it.

Right now, we have greater access to a wider breadth of knowledge than any of our ancestors ever dreamed of and we’re mostly squandering it by delving into things that will never be of any value to ourselves or future generations.

I challenge you. Today, Google something or someone that you’ve heard of and are embarrassed to ask about. Discover something new about your local, state or national government. Learn about a rights campaign or a struggle going on in another country. Inform yourself about a leader in a nation other than ours. Transform into the knowledgeable citizens you have every responsibility and right to be.