For the record, I never said that. (The Twitter handles of those who sent it will go unmentioned in order to protect the guilty.) That’s a Tweet I saw, and to which I responded this way: “Obama wasn’t referring to greed. He was referencing FDR’s 4 Freedoms Speech. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms”
What upset me more than the sarcasm was the ignorance it showed. I couldn’t decide what surprised me most; that “freedom from want” could be so easily misinterpreted as ‘freedom from desire’, or that the phrase “freedom from want” didn’t immediately spark recognition of an allusion to one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most famous speeches?
The banner on my website, which I seem to quote with annoying frequency, is, “An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.” This is a prime example of why that’s so.
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