November, 2007: The Straight Dope vanquishes ignorance.
March, 2008: In one of the millions of posts congratulating ourselves for this achievement, a member makes the mistake of referring to the triumph as “the extinction of ignorance.” Here and there across the globe, synapses sputter and spark, sending a message to their forebrains: “hey! extinction is bad, right?”
June, 2008: The view, a minority one at first, that the extinction of anything is a loss and deserves mourning is advanced. Sometimes eloquently, sometimes with clumsy glurge, it is suggested that even ignorance was part of the rich tapestry of existence. The unravellers feel unsettled, even as they claim that ignorance is not a point of view or a cultural feature, but rather the antithesis of those things. Then somebody writes a poem.
July, 2008: It is accepted wisdom to wish for a small amount of ignorance to be found and preserved, under carefully controlled conditions, to serve as instruction and warning. Also, we’re still running out of oil and the globe is getting even warmer, and with careful study, maybe we can find out why ignorance never worried about those and other problems. I mean, the stated reasons were idiotic, so there had to be something else, right? Meanwhile, on the SDMB, posters can and do claim ignorance was “the victim of genocide,” and live to post again.
August, 2008: An SDMB post, 34,107,698 words long, lists all of the groups, institutions, nations, cultures, beliefs and individuals that have at one time or another been called “ignorant” or one of its synonyms (the post consists, basically, of quoting an excerpt of everything ever posted on the board), and asking if we are prepared to exterminate all of them, too. Resistance to the “ignorance has a right to exist” meme collapses. Meanwhile, rumors surface telling of a shadowy plan to reanimate AM radio personalities. When it is pointed out that most of them are not, in fact, dead, the plan continues as before.
September, 2008: Scientists claim to have created a small amount of ignorance in a lab in Provo, Utah, but of a containment failure are unable to say how they did it.
October, 2008: The government reveals that it has been monitoring and “protecting” unvanquished pockets of ignorance in various places around the globe for years. The public outcry leads a president to resign, but not before attempting to spike the presidential election by withdrawing the prophylactic safeguards between ignorance and the world at large.
November, 2008: One year after its extinction, ignorance returns in full flower to the SDMB. To universal acclaim.
