Recently a telephone survey of 1,000 Americans conducted by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, a museum dedicated to the First Amendment, found that more Americans could name more members of Simpsons than First Amendment rights. Is that scary or what?

The First Amendment guarantees freedom of religion, free speech, free press, association, and the ability to petition government. In the McCormick Tribune survey only one in four Americans could name more than one of their rights.

National Geographic has another scary statistic: of 500 young Americans between the ages of 18 and 24, six percent of them could not find the USA on a world map.  Three quarters of those same 18-24 year olds believe English is the most common language on the planet.  English is third on the list behind Chinese Mandarin and Spanish.

There is an old joke that war was invented to teach Americans geography, but that no longer seems to be true.

The National Geographic poll was conducted three years after the Iraq war and only 37 percent of those same 18-24 year olds could find Iraq on a map of the Middle East while only one in four could find Israel on the same map. There is an old joke that war was invented to teach Americans geography, but that no longer seems to be true.

I find it very unnerving to think many young Americans couldn't pass a basic citizenship test, but they can name all of the Simpsons and know who bedded down which Kardashian or what Miley Cyrus is up to.

These 18 to 24 year old Americans are voting and shaping the future of this once great nation and they have no idea what their basic rights are and have no concept of who our enemies are. Seems like we are failing in our efforts to educate children.

I don't have a solution but it seems to me that something must be done differently to insure the existence of our great nation. If children and then young adults don't even know what their First Amendment rights are, those rights can be systematically eliminated without a whimper from the uneducated electorate.

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