As we trudge reluctantly toward the next election, every candidate is determined to make a mark on the political landscape. Such is the case with Democratic front-runner Al Gore.

This man has all the charisma of a pine board and he knows he cannot follow in the illustrious footsteps of his Commander in Chief. Gore is trying to define himself as a forward thinker.

According to Saturday’s Des Moines Register, Al Gore spoke at a convention in Seattle and called public schools “a national emergency.” He spoke of a “digital divide” and proposed a federal program of $2 billion per year to wire schools to the Internet, making our children more competitive in this brave new world.

A hurricane off the coast of Florida is a national emergency, not lack of Web access for ten-year-olds to play “Duke” and surf for porn. This is just more political grandstanding.

The “digital divide” Gore spoke of exists in poor areas. Federal funds cannot rectify the obvious disparity in school tax revenue. We may try, but people don’t like seeing their tax dollars at work for somebody else. If you want state socialism, go someplace else.

As great an idea as hooking everyone up to the Web may sound, it is moderately unfeasible and definitely unnecessary. Computer hardware setup requires money and knowledge, and if schools have a problem with their equipment, it will be difficult to solve their problems over the phone.

I do computer support in Des Moines and the calls I handle over the phone are the worst; users don’t know what they’re doing and muck things up by mistake.

Web access is unnecessary because it doesn’t teach people anything they can’t learn from a book. The local library has a better reference desk for facts than the Web. Most of the crap on the Web was written by some lunatic. Any nutcase can have a Webpage. I have mine.

The Web promotes laziness and poor social skills. I know people who e-mail friends next door because they’re too lazy to get off their asses. The only time I use e-mail is for friends out of state with whom I have trouble getting in touch.

Another problem with this most recent push for an Internet classroom is that it comes from a man who, if he didn’t hold high office, would be considered a weirdo. Any man who is so green as to believe we should all be riding bicycles has some serious issues, and can you honestly trust someone who claims to have invented the Internet?

That the Web was a project under DARPA to allow scientific institutions working on military applications to converse seems lost on the man. My grandfather may have discovered the lost city of Atlantis, and I did author the first Web browser, but you don’t see me bragging, do you?

Gore is just trying to latch onto a technological idea that he can claim is visionary, but I suspect that it is more of a hallucination.

This Internet classroom is a pipe dream like his “fiber-optic network” was back in ’92. Then he proposed laying billions of dollars in fiber-optic cable because he was too stupid to do any research.

If the man had done his homework he would have known faster modems were on the way and that most speed problems are at the server end, and not with the user’s connection.

Perhaps his pipe dreams come from a crack pipe.

It’s easy to play on people’s fears especially when you can say that in 2000 the computer industry will have some 300,000 jobs unfilled. Most of these will be network and support related, and to learn those skills you don’t need Internet access.

You don’t even need a college degree. I have friends that dropped out of college and make more than most graduates ever will, and our network consultant at work has a two-year degree from a trade school. Wiring the kiddies up to the Web is not needed.

But Al Gore needs a cause and computers are his gamble. Hopefully, the voters will see him for what he is and ignore him next year, because any yokel can wrap himself up in buzzwords and sound like he knows what he’s doing. But only if you utilize synergy to re-engineer core process can you alter your paradigm and really give the voters a load of bull.

Most of you reading this didn’t have your first Internet experience until you came to college and surfed the Web. Old farts like me used a text-based search engine called Lynx way back in ’95, and we turned out okay. Now I have a sister in middle school who uses e-mail more than I do, but it hasn’t made her smarter or a more productive member of the future workforce.

If anything, she is more dependent on technology and at the mercy of someone who can get her network printer running properly.

My diatribe does not mean I want to go back to carrier pigeons, but we both know Web access is not needed to give our kids the competitive edge in today’s world. Whether learned from a book or a computer, intelligence comes first. And cheating comes second.

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Aaron Woell is a senior in political science from Bolingbrook, Ill.