We’ve gone from dumb to dumber to unapologetically ignorant — and, it seems, proud of it

nudges on social media, no flyers or advertisements, no events at schools, no outreach whatsoever. And not just for COVID, mind you, but for everything — measles, mumps, tetanus, diphtheria, hepatitis, polio.

In a pandemic.

In a state with a lessthan-stellar COVID vaccination rate.

At a time when experts are tracking the rise of a deadlier new COVID variant.

It is hard to imagine behavior dumber, more dangerous, more shortsighted and more downright bass-ackward than that exhibited by Tennessee and its lawmakers.

Which is, unfortunately, right on brand for this country in this era. It was in the 2000s that Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe the right wing’s secession from objective fact, and some of us began to speak of them as living in an “alternate reality.” How, we wondered in newspaper columns and speeches, can we have meaningful discourse if we cannot agree on basic facts?

Years later, that concern feels too abstract. The threat turns out to be more visceral and urgent than any of us could have imagined. Yes, some people live in alternate realities. What’s worse, though, is when they have power to impose those realities on the rest of us. That’s what we’re seeing in Tennessee and elsewhere, and the results will be as tragic as they are predictable and preventable.

Ignorance is bliss, they say. But it isn’t.

Ignorance is fever. Ignorance is chills. Ignorance is trouble breathing.

Ignorance is an empty seat at the table, a bedroom come suddenly available.

Because ignorance is death.

And while the aphorism isn’t true, can you imagine if it were, if ignorance really were bliss? Disney theme parks would have to find a new slogan.

Right now, Tennessee would be the happiest place on Earth.

Friends often ask me why I remain a Roman Catholic when I disagree with so much of the Catholic Church’s retro doctrine. My answer is simple: The Catholic Church hierarchy is not the Catholic faith movement.

If I thought for a second the two were one and the same, I’d have tossed my missal years ago.

And I feel the same way about the Black Lives Matter racial-justice movement.

Especially, after the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation — BLM’s church hierarchy, as it were — posted a leftist statement about the unrest in Cuba that was as about as clueless as they come.

It’s an astonishingly tone-deaf love letter to the island’s repressive and oppressive communist regime. It absolves the dictatorship of any role in the economic and humanrights suffering of 11 million Cubans while heaving every ounce of blame on the United States.

I, too, support lifting the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. It does hurt regular Cubans on the island. But I favor scrapping it just as much because for six decades it’s given the regime an all-too-convenient scapegoat for its iron-fisted incompetence — not one mention of which you’ll find in the Foundation’s penned-by-the-politburo declaration.

Like a term paper from a zealous sophomore poli-sci major, it’s stuffed with ideological incoherence.

It asserts the United States is “undermining Cubans’ right to choose their own government.” Memo to the Foundation: the regime, not the United States, pulled that rug from under Cubans’ feet yet again at its commie convention this year by doubling down on one-party rule.

It claims Cubans are “being punished by the U.S. government because [their] country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination.” Right, the island’s prisons are full of folks who tried the self-determination thing for themselves.

It signs off by reminding us the Cuban regime “has historically demonstrated solidarity with oppressed people of African descent.” True enough — which makes it all the more galling that the statement refuses to acknowledge oppressed Cubans of African descent. Or did the Foundation not see all the Black faces among the angry protesters in the videos live-streaming from Havana to Santiago a week ago?

Just as important, it conveniently forgets that many of those Afro-Cubans are in the vanguard of the San Isidro dissident artists movement, which demonstrated in Havana last summer in support of Black Lives Matter after the murder of George Floyd — and after the alleged excessiveforce killing of a Black man, Hansel Martínez, by Cuban police.

So, what the communiqué confirms is that the two or three retro-lefties, such as Opal Tometi, who claim to speak for Black Lives Matter are rank, dogmatic hypocrites.

What it does not prove, by any stretch of the retrorighty imagination, is that the Black Lives Matter movement is Marxist.

As soon as the statement hit Instagram Wednesday night, right-wingers, especially here in Miami, leapt onto social media demanding a prostrate apology from all of us who’ve “smeared” their brethren for having called BLM radical left-wing guerrillas.

They shouldn’t hold their breath.

The Foundation’s statement was hardly a surprise. Anyone who’s watched Black Lives Matter since its inception eight years ago knows a handful of its founders embrace Marxism — just as Catholics like me have long been aware that too many bishops who claim to speak for Catholicism have condoned misogyny, homophobia and shielding pedophiles.

That doesn’t mean the Catholic faith is guilty of sexual abuse. Nor does it mean the Black Lives Matter movement is a communist plot — that it doesn’t signify something much more to Americans than Tometi and the other founder flakes. And I’m confident most Americans agree.

But, especially during last year’s election, that hasn’t stopped Trumpist conservatives from insisting that because Tometi took a photo with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro six years ago, the entire BLM phenomenon we know today is out to turn Miami schoolchildren into Castro-hugging Young Pioneers.

That’s exactly what the likes of Miami Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar and YouTube “influencer” Alex Otaola were screaming last year and still are.

Their dishonest aim is to gin up white and Latino panic — and votes — by equating Black Lives Matter with Che Guevara’s firing squads.

And I do not apologize for calling them out for it.

Tim Padgett is the Americas editor for Miami NPR affiliate WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida.