Commentary

Gibberish

Can you say drivel?1 I totally didn’t say anything I meant here, but I had to fulfill the stupid requirements for the assignments. I really just didn’t care, so I spit out these generic, lame assignments and expect a mediocre grade.


  1. Drivel defined: http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Adrivel [back]

Finals are over, free for Christmas break

Well, finals are over. I have the next few weeks off before the winter ‘07 semester begins. I survived the first semester, and actually managed to get pretty good grades.

In Strategies for Online Learning—which was, I think, the dumbest class I’ve ever taken—I received a 91.84%, a solid A minus, with 349 of a possible 380 points. I can’t remember dreading homework as much as in this class. I think I even enjoyed high school biology more (and I didn’t like high school biology at all).

I fared slightly better in History of Popular Culture, with a 94.27%—329 of 349 possible points. I think I should actually have 10 points more than that, and I am contesting my grade. The instructor graded the final assignments before the end of the 24-hour school day and before I turned my assignment in. She gave me a zero for the 10-point assignment. So, if I were given full credit for that assignment, my final grade in the class would be 97.13%, with 339 of 349 possible points.

“War of the Worlds” hysteria

Yesterday, I finished an assignment for my History of Popular Culture course that dealt with the topic of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938 and the mass hysteria that followed. 1

Just now, I thought it an interesting observation that my response to a national emergency broadcast was so different. 2

I remember when I first witnessed the 9/11 attacks on TV; I thought that I had mistakenly tuned into the middle of some off-color movie about terrorist attacks on American soil. I first assumed that what I was witnessing could not possibly be true because nobody would dare to attack the United States of America, the most powerful nation on the planet. My perception of our country was that we were invincible. The thought that four commercial jets had been hijacked and purposely crashed was absurd. As I watched, I realized that someone actually had attacked us, and succeeded on an unprecedented scale to strike fear—and anger—into the hearts of Americans across the nation.

Today, we are raised to think for ourselves, to verify fact, to reason. Information about nearly anything is available in moments if we care to research it, and we take information at face value. Society has learned to distrust mass media establishments instead of blindly accepting what is broadcast or published.

This event was a turning point in American thought. The country was so “overly excited,” as a fellow student at AIO observed, in its perception of threat to America because of World War II that many Americans accepted and believed that aliens had landed on our planet and were carrying out a mission of death and destruction.

In a way, it is sad that people are not as trusting, have grown so cynical. 3 But if it also means that we are less susceptible to a future attack, such as 9/11, then it is a necessary overhead that our society must bear.


  1. More can be read about The War of the Worlds radio broadcast on Wikipedia. [back]
  2. What was your initial response to the news of 9/11? [back]
  3. Does that mean that we as a country and a people are becoming less trustworthy and more deceitful? [back]