There is a Pensacola woman talking to reporters

She's got a nice big camera trained on her stupid face. She's very pretty and there's a kid in the shot with her, possibly her own child.

She's bemoaning what's happening to her beaches. "This is just awful," she declares. Why? prompts the reporter. "Because our beaches are being ruined forever," she wails. "They'll never be the same again."

How ignorant can you be? How can you be so stupid as not to know that nature repairs itself? How can you be so anthropocentric as to think otherwise? What is education giving these people any more? You have to know that environmentalism is a huge part of our curriculum nowadays. Are the teachers feeding the children anything but hysterics? Where is the awe and love for the gigantic majesty and power of nature?

This is the same woman--the same mindset, the same ignorance, the same tiny world with narrow horizons--that Al Gore can sell his global warming hysteria to when he stands on a beach toe-deep in salt water, and lectures us that "twenty years ago the water stopped there"--pointing fifty feet away--"and today it's washing against their back patio"--with a dramatic wave to the luxury houses behind him. Then follows a lecture about how the oceans are rising thanks to global warming.

But only in that one spot. Ten miles north of where he and the youthful press crew stand, the beach is exactly as it has been for decades.

None of the youthful reporters attending this latest of Gore's hysteria events has the knowledge to ask him about "beach erosion, much?" or to point out that the other beaches along the same coast don't seem to have the same rising ocean; perhaps the continental shelf is floating, and thus rising along with the rising oceans?

None have enough education to know the difference between a hundred years and a hundred thousand years, because, like Gore, they have tiny little worlds with tiny little horizons and are incapable of seeing the big picture because for them there IS no big picture. The books they were forced to read in school were all current. No one has ever read about life in the Middle Ages, or under the Roman Empire. None of them have ever seen a movie about any time outside their very own.

I think it's because their teachers are just as ignorant as their students.

But this has turned into a rant about the education system and the serious lack thereof. The woman on TV crying about her beaches being "ruined forever" is ignorant, but she is ignorant by choice, and that's what bothers me.