Last night, I was minding my own business and simultaneously reading my Facebook NewsFeed.  Yes, it’s one of those types of posts.

Someone I know shared a video from a gentleman whose agenda appeared to be to exhibit how little some college students knew about ISIS.

What do you know about ISIS?

Here is a trustworthy site that covers some basics.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/isis

I know very little.  I understand they claim to pose a threat to the US.  I understand they are an extremist branch of individuals who, for reasons we may never fully comprehend, may very well act upon their alleged hatred of the US.

For the sake of this post, the amount of intelligence that you, dear reader, or I have at the moment is actually not what launched the following.

This video was designed not to inform the viewer about something that could be potentially dangerous.  It was, it seems, designed to make fun of college students’ ignorance of this danger.  (In short, he says to one interviewee that one would assume that the college would be filled with informed citizens).

The caption, whose author is an apparent fan of capital letters and punctuation marks, reads like this:

[SO STUPID!! Can you believe HOW MANY COLLEGE STUDENTS actually SIGN A PETITION supporting the TERRORIST ORGANIZATION ISIS????????? Who lets these people vote???]

It’s me again…(Steve…the author of this post)

“Who lets these people vote?[??]”?

1.  I saw no voting booths in the shot.

2.  Any voting going on that afternoon on campus was more than likely unrelated to a world terrorist crisis.

3.  Our Constitution entitles all citizens eighteen and above the privilege to vote.

Why were college students targeted here?  It was unclear.

However, one might assume that the creator has a personal vendetta against college in general.  Ironically, assuming he and his crew were permitted to be on campus for this project, he certainly didn’t seem too interested in teaching anything the uninformed students had not learned.  [You’d think adults would be on a college campus to teach the students passing by.] No.  His time was much better used to embarrass them by filming them (I must assume) without their knowledge, and giving them no recourse or opportunity to gain anything useful from his project.

Nope.  Just laughs.

Is this guy a professional comedian?  Should we respect his art in making college students look- and feel bad about themselves?  What will his next project be, one wonders?  Which unsuspecting citizen will be next in his series of films?

It should be noted that he dances around a few ethical issues in obtaining these signatures.  I’m far from an expert on this and many other subjects, but I feel that misinforming a prospective signer of the petition might be what the invisible legal text beside me cites as “Bullshit.”

This, to me, is a sad version of the Modern American.  Instead of helping learn about a terrorist organization and sharing verified information with the world, we have citizens who devote entire blocks of time to show how some of us know some things and some of us have yet to learn those things.

It creates an even larger divide among our citizens.  We tend to do anything we can to show the world we aren’t as ugly, uneducated, poor, morally empty, or soulless as the person beside us.   I can’t say that the same mentality exists worldwide.  As an optimist, I would like to believe Americans are the only country to keep this endless cycle rotating (and publish it for the public).

Our lives ought to be filled with laughter.  However, I question the cost at which we reach that joy.

By the way, the series of comments I read (all of which appeared to be both entertained and pissed off) were startlingly consistent with this gentleman’s agenda.