The Age Of The Expert

Somewhere along the line someone came up with the notion that to really get ahead, one had to be an expert. It was no longer good enough just to be good at something, one had to be an expert. Today, we have experts on every subject imaginable, and there are hundreds of thousands of them fighting for attention and credibility. Companies hire them, government employs an army of them, they're all over talk TV and talk radio. They're in magazines, newspapers, and on the Internet. They write books. Throw a stick in Walmart and you'll hit nine of them. Because most of them are pretenders, their opinions are worthless and people have started to ignore what they say. Real experts have extensive educations, specific training and mentoring, and years and years of meaningful experience. For this reason there are only a handful of true experts whose voices get lost in the noise created by the imposters. And perhaps the phoniest of phonies are the instant experts, people who claim the title simply because they have just been elected to political office. Absolutely no one should take these compulsive talkers seriously. Most of them don't know anything except how to con people into voting for them. The only way to shut these big mouths up is to vote them out of office as soon as possible. But here's the problem: they will probably be replaced by another media-obsessed, blabber-mouth fake. The only way to avoid them is to turn off your TV, your radio, and your computer. But who can do that?