Functional Illiteracy Is Just Plain Stupid
If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you’re functionally illiterate.
KING by Jonathan Eig sits on top my navy blue leather desk creased at page 133. It rests in-between reads next to the Essential Goethe, both finding a little space among piles of papers, notebooks, and mementos spread across my office.
Now that I have more time than ever before, I’ve unpacked hundreds of items from the past few decades. Tons of ticket stubs, photographs, programs, journals, and more, tossed one at a time with no rhyme or reason into bins that have moved between closets and attics, waiting for their day in the sun to guide me through my nostalgia.
In all the stuff I notice how much I’ve learned.
I used to be such an idiot.
My travels, my friends, the movies, the plays, the performances, and the books. It shouldn’t possible for someone to escape decades of life with the same point of view. The point of view has to change.
And just like your body changes depending on what you feed it, so too does your point of view. And General Mattis is so correct and wise that unless your mind is saturated by real information — books — “you’re functionally illiterate.”
It does take hundreds of books.
Martin Luther King Jr. is a good example for me. Eig’s KING is now filling in cracks left between a variety of other books like David Blight’s Frederick Douglass, Kennedy & King, Barracoon, No Ashes In The Fire, Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Glaude’s Begin Again, and more.
I’ve read a bunch of articles, and I’ve visited a bunch of museums, and these contribute to some literacy about MLK and the civil rights era. But it’s only when I sit with many books on the subject that my brain gets the time to accumulate enough knowledge to be literate in it.
It doesn’t mean I become “correct” or that I develop the right, or most astute and perfect point of view. It just means that I become literate. And General Mattis is right that if I didn’t learn enough about KING through all of this reading, I would be “functionally illiterate” about the subject.
Yet that wouldn’t stop me from tossing opinions into the world’s pit of shallow, fragmented information.
Functional illiteracy is not illegal.
It’s just stupid…and simple to overcome.