Ignorance is bliss?

I met a girl once. She was really sweet, and kind of cute. I asked her what she did; she didn't have a job, because she was on disability -- although there didn't appear to be anything wrong with her. She didn't have any hobbies, either. When I asked what she did all day, she said she watched TV, or chatted with friends on Yahoo, or talked to her sister on the phone. She never read books, or even newspapers or magazines.

That was pretty much the end of our relationship. There just wasn't anything we could talk about.

But I meet a lot of people like her, blissfully ignorant folk with an astounding lack of curiosity about the world around them. These people don't own a single book, or they think a half-dozen Danielle Steele novels is "a lot of books." They are content to sit, mesmerized, in front of the TV. And when they do, they aren't watching CNN... they are feeding their poor, useless brains a steady diet of sitcoms and "reality" shows.

These people are out there, in greater numbers than you can imagine. And here's what scares me: their vote counts the same as yours and mine.