Barack Obama isn’t a genius.
He’s not stupid or a bad politician, but he certainly doesn’t compare to other people who have been graced with this title such as Albert Einstein.
Between March 7-13, MSNBC held an online poll to decide who viewers thought was the “ultimate genius” during a 7 Days of Genius event.
The poll was presented in a split-bracket format much like the upcoming NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament.
The bracket was split into the four categories of politics, innovation, science and morality. Normally it would be easy to just ignore anything MSNBC does, but probably 10 viewers have decided the top two are Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Barack Obama.
The entirety of Obama is just so brilliant that your drunk grandpa thinks he’s comparable to the greatest reimagining of our universe since evolution.
What do the common people think genius means?
“A genius is somebody that really excels in a certain field … somebody that is far above the common man,” said Delta College student Carol Avenino.
I’ll give Obama some slack, to be president he definitely would have to excel in leadership and persuasion to convince the people of America to elect him into office twice.
We’d also have to give credit to that great genius of the 1960s Richard Nixon and let’s not forget about more recent geniuses like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
If you’re going to throw around a word as meaningful as genius then that “genius” should be able to put forward something that can prove it.
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was recently proven when two black holes collided a billion light-years away revealing the existence of gravitational waves in the fabric of space-time. This realization has shown scientists that time and space are interwoven; they work as one in the universe.
Compare that to Obamacare. One will outlast human life and the other will be immediately destroyed by President Donald Trump.
A more shameful comparison would be to compare George Washington Carver’s to the creators of Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) and Uber (Travis Kalanick).
“In a sense kind of… the way that [Facebook] is used now I kinda don’t think that it’s genius,” said Delta College student Jennifer Goodman.
They’re both certainly great ideas.
Uber can take you anywhere you need to be when you’re lost or your car broke down or you’re just drunk.
Facebook allows you to keep in touch with the world and remain up to date with friends and family.
But, before Carver came along farmers had to pay for real cotton, which was expensive in the late 1800s. Peanuts were cheap and grew in surplus. Before Uber there were taxis. Before Facebook there was the outside world.
It’s easy to look at who people call geniuses and criticize what the term has become.
What if we start to look at genius as “something revolutionary, something that could help the world,” in the words of Dejion Capers, Delta College student.
Not to discredit anyone who would think otherwise but it seems as if, more than anything, genius has become a term that we attach to the person and not the action.
A person isn’t born, thinks brilliance and dies. A person gets up and creates something beautiful when the moment strikes them and that’s how genius is born.
That’s how genius should be.