Riddle me this, riddle me that.

I can’t be seen, heard or held, but my actions can be felt. I sometimes manifest myself in subtle actions. I shut people’s minds and make them have delusions of grandeur. I close people’s ears and make them deaf to the stories and experiences of other people. I blind people and make them unable to see the effects of their negative actions.

I am ignorance, and I am everywhere.

Ignorance attaches itself differently to different people. It attaches itself like a leech to the hearts of bigots, sucking away any emotions for people who are different from them. It attaches itself to the brains of well-educated people, reducing complex problems to simple stereotypes. The result is a sick society in which people discriminate without realizing it and hate without knowing it.

The symptoms of this ignorance-inflicted disease are prevalent in Ames. When people cough out statements like “Go back to where you came from,” ignorance is the only possible diagnosis.

The world is a lot more complex than corn fields growing by gravel roads. Intelligent people don’t speak with a certain accent or dress in a certain way. The world is more integrated, diverse and complex than that. The circumstances in which each of us are now have been affected by a lot of things, including centuries of history.

To think otherwise would be to suffer from foolishness and delusions of grandeur inflicted by ignorance.

In 1986, Philip Emeagwali built the fastest computer system the world had ever seen. It was a system that was capable of computing 3.1 billion calculations per second.

Philip Emeagwali was a Nigerian who won the Gordon Bell Prize for computing. His invention is used in chess computers like Deep Blue and to help scientists understand how oil flows underground. Why aren’t achievements like these emphasized in the media?

Most of the countries in Africa have been independent for less than half a century and are making progress. America has had more than 200 years to figure out democracy, yet some people here expect it to happen overnight in countries that have been exploited for their resources for centuries.

When the British colonized Nigeria, for example, they figured it would be an effective tactic to put people who spoke different languages and had different cultures in clashes with one another. The culture of ethnic violence we are seeing today in many African countries is a consequence of that divide-and-conquer technique.

People who suffer from delusions of grandeur ignore all environmental factors and think somehow their superior morals and intellect have made them better than others.

As a result, people who don’t fit their mold of how intelligent and good people should act are dehumanized. This made it easier to be racist toward blacks in the past. Now this same ignorance-inflicted illness is making it so much easier to go bomb and kill more than 10,000 Iraqi people in the name of freedom.

Would the U.S. government bomb places in the inner cities where gangs are thought to be living in the interest of liberating America from gangs? The ends never justify the means. It is just as Martin Luther King Jr. said: “You can never bring about constructive ends through destructive means.”

Increases in the number of terrorist attacks around the world show us that the world is becoming more integrated. Problems like poverty that affect some countries directly affect all countries indirectly.

People can no longer build fortresses to protect themselves; someday we all have to go out and face the reality of a very integrated world.

Why would anyone go out to face life’s battles with a spear blunted by ignorance?

This is one riddle I cannot solve.