People in the United States of America have been "asleep at the wheel" while their airwaves, traditional media, education and political discourse have been perpetually "dumbed down" to the point where the average citizen is often unaware and indifferent of major people, places and events of the world and from history.
If you don't think education matters, and that news like the latest pop-glam scandal are more important than knowing what goes into our food, our environment, our foreign and domestic policies and what's happening around the world, then you'll probably fail to grasp the significance of the following video:
There are serious problems with our capacity to understand the world around us, and this is often used to our disadvantage by special interests and politicians.
We not only need to improve our quality of education -- the standards and the methods, and not simply "teach to the test" in a manner that further narrows our awareness -- we also need to improve and protect our channels for communication, and to silence the screaming peacock of infomedia before it completely subverts the true legacy of the news and traditional media: the role of informing the public.
The most insidious danger facing our nation today is not the undermining of our Constitution or the subversion of our democracy. It is not the wave of (predominantly Republican-sponsored) perversion and corruption that has swept unchecked through our nation's government and washed away the checks and balances that worked so long at preserving our national integrity.
It is the growing intellectual and social apathy of the public.
We cannot hope to simply coast through life and have all our needs met; that's the arrogance and contempt oft associated with a detached royalty. If we do not fight the trend to keep us unaware and uninformed, we are in effect surrendering ourselves to the vested self-interests of those who have already demonstrated that they hold in contempt those things that we value most. Those who most wish for us to abdicate our responsibility and our integrity have shown us that they themselves have none, and that they are wholly unable to manage a nation.
It's time we started waking up our fellow citizens and alert them to the impending loss of our collective sanity.
Failure to do so would be beyond negligent -- it would be simply insane.
I'd seen videos similar in the past and other "man on the street" type interviews (ever seen "Jaywalking" or remember seeing / hearing / reading Art Linkletter's "Kids say the darndest things"?), and a friend pointed out that the video presented is, quite likely, entirely scripted (note the "CNNN" logo somewhere within).
(Hat-tip Decon66 of Delphiforums.)
That doesn't mean that people really aren't that stupid -- that simply means that we should take this particular video with a grain of salt, and hope that we can't so easily find a clueless segment of our populace.
However...that said, does anyone believe that Mike Huckabee was in on this?
