Don't know much...

I consider myself to be a reasonably well-informed individual. Maybe too much so, sometimes -- I had a conversation yesterday that consisted solely of my friend telling me things about her life, and me responding with recent articles I had read that related. But it wasn't always this way. In my misspent youth, I was as guilty as most young Americans in my ignorance of the world around me. I remember vividly the day the Berlin Wall came down, two of my friends and I spent the afternoon wandering around campus, looking for change on the ground so we could buy a paper and find out what was happening. It wasn't until second semester of my junior year of college (spring of '93), when I had a history class at Columbia taught by a Mr. Craig, that I started getting excited about politics. I don't remember Mr. Craig's first name, and he doesn't teach at Columbia any more, but damn, he was one of the best professors I ever had. (It's always amused me how broad Columbia's history classes are -- the class I had with Mr. Craig was "U.S. History II: Civil War to present day"!)

Anyway, sometimes things that I should have known kind of shock me, because they happened during those dark years when I paid attention to nothing but my own little world. For example, today I stumbled across this explanation of the ratification of the 27th amendment to the Constitution. It happened in 1992. You'd think that an amendment to the Constitution would be big enough news that I might have heard about it (I mean come on, it's the only Amendment that has been ratified in my lifetime!), but no, I had no idea whatsoever that all this had taken place. Sigh.

So, anyway, thanks Straight Dope! Once again you have shone a light on the dark corners of my ignorance. Or something like that.