Thoughts
Still thinking about the Tumblr post, 'there's no excuse for being bad at geography, there's literally a wikipedia page called list of
countries.' Like yeah but I don't have it memorized I'm sorry. They used the phrase "bare minimum." Like if opening the Wikipedia page for list of countries is the bare minimum I'm sorry we're so far gone. 8% of the population can't read. I'm not excusing willful ignorance, but you are living in a hyper-educated nerdy bubble.
I had to pull up the post: "there are blank maps of continents online which you can use to practice." I would like to apologize to the 7.3 million people living in Laos because I have no idea where your country is and I really frankly do not care. Also I'm not going to lie, I wouldn't say I knew Montenegro was a country at all. That one is probably is on me.
Also the post was very particular about how annoying Americans are about not knowing geography, with the implication that it's a result of US-centrism. But I'm actually just bad at geography, I don't know where Jacksonville or Oklahoma City are. Hopefully Oklahoma City is in Oklahoma, but I'm not confident in my ability to point to Oklahoma on a map. (That's a lie, I know what Oklahoma looks like because I have the "I'm Ok...lahoma" image seared into my brain. I could also confidently identify Chad for you on a map of Africa because of the memes.)