Judgy-wudgy was a bear

After reading (and posting a ridiculously long comment) Julie's blog about the latest homeless American Girl Doll, I couldn't help but wonder are we as Americans digressing each day? In a country where Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg, Larry Page and others invented extraordinary pieces of technology, (if you have googled and checked facebook today on your Mac you've used all of their products) how can we cultivate a generation of little girls who want $100 dolls that are supposed to be homeless people? This is a serious lack of good judgement and someone needs to be judged for it.

I was talking to a new Boulder friend this weekend about the difference in how Europeans judge people vs. how Americans judge people. In Europe, particularly Paris, citizens sit at sidewalk cafes for hours for the sole pleasure of picking apart the passerby. Is this rude? No. It's the culture. Now many of us have sat at Starbucks, the Classic Cup on the Plaza or any other sidewalk cafe and commented "cute shoes" when a girl walks by. But what if our comment was "Elle ne sais rien" or which would basically translate to "Did she look in the mirror?" We would be considered rude. This judgment is why Paris is the capital of the fashion world- people look in the mirror before they go out.

So my point: what if we applied the same judgmental attitude to our intelligence? Would we become the intelligence capital of the world if people knew they would be judged for being deliberately stupid? I can only hope a store clerk somewhere is thinking "Elle ne sais rien" when she sees a mother buying a homeless American Girl doll for her 8-year-old.

Americans are judgmental in their own way. When President Obama went to Denmark to lobby for the 2016 Olympic Games to come to Chicago, we judged. We called it "Obama's Olympic Mistake" when he didn't "succeed" by getting the games in his hometown. We are very judgmental.

It's high time we started to be judgmental for the right things, like a lack of good judgement.