While having coffee with a friend the other day, he told me one of those tid bits that makes you cringe at your own society.

While in a classroom, he refer­enced Dante’s Inferno, and no one got it.

While you wouldn’t expect most people to have read Dante’s Infer­no, you would at least hope that one in 30 would have heard of the Divine Comedy.

Sadly, this fact is only horrify­ing, and not all that surprising.

I understand as much as the next student that by the time you’ve finished thumbing through some textbook written by what seems like Einstein himself, your brain is on its last leg.

It’s nice to just veg in your 10×10 living space and let your brain­waves de-tangle.

However, it would not kill us to pick up a book for leisure’s sake.

The average reading level of American adults falls somewhere between that of an 8th or 9th grader.

As of 2004, 85% of Americans were recipients of high school di­plomas.

The problem is not that we are uneducated; it is that we are lazy.

Ask most college students what the last book they read was and they will search their brains for what it was their high school sum­mer reading required.

However, ask any of Jersey Shore’s 8.5 million viewers if Sam­mie and Ronnie are back together, and you will get an answer.

Have we really come to this?

A generation who can quote “The Situation” before Dante?

Consider what that has us leav­ing behind to the generation that will follow us.

If all we have to contribute is stockpiled slogans we ripped off from guidos, I feel sorry for our fu­ture children.

As we build the entry gate for the next generation, it only seems appropriate to steal an inscription from Dante, himself: “’Abandon every hope, you who enter.’”