As a person who preordered the first iPad mini solely for reading, I used to get mad that most Americans don’t actively or even care to read. That’s changed now.
When studies showed that almost half of Americans can’t read well enough to understand their own health information to save on health care costs and that the national reading grade level is dropping every year I stopped getting mad, because I realized that it’s not that most Americans don’t read, it’s that they can’t read, period. But Americans who can’t read are nothing new.
In the past, in the age of slavery, African-American slaves couldn’t read, it was a crime to know how to. Laws and crimes solely made to keep people down like that are nothing new. But some slaves taught themselves how to read, laws be damned, proudly and secretly announcing to their fellow slaves that they’d finally “stolen back their own bodies.” By simply knowing how to read and exercising their ability to they weren’t slaves to the system anymore.
Today, in the age of terms of agreements, master companies and politicians have corrected themselves. They no longer bar people from reading because that instills in them the worst sort of defiance, an educational defiance. No, today’s masters have corrected themselves, the best way to make someone a willing slave isn’t to make reading a crime but to instil in them the idea that they’re totally able-bodied and absolutely free to do anything they want while they still don’t know how to really read the papers they’re signing. What’s a little reading when you’re free to do anything else with your time, right?
Imagine all the rights you can make the average American sign away in the fine print when half of the population can’t literally read to save their own lives, is proud of it, and the number’s only going up. Imagine what the country with the highest literacy rate in the world, Russia, can do to the average American’s body without them ever noticing.
Whoever thought to use freedom itself as the chains that bind in the land of the free was a mastermind, if not just simply master-minded. Because what’s a little thing like knowing how to read the terms of agreements you’re signing and your own healthcare information when you’re absolutely free to do anything else with your time? Right?