Americans Aren’t Stupid
Neal Boortz admits that he thinks most Americans aren't smart enough to live in our free society. While I think that sentiment may be a bit extreme, he makes some very good points. Before you get too upset let me provide you with some important excerpts, though you really should read the whole thing.
I don't think Americans are stupid as much as they've been lulled to sleep by the leftist media and entertainment industry. We believe too much of what we're told on television. When CNN does a segment on socialized medicine it slants the broadcast toward the side it supports. Most Americans don't pick up on that sort of thing because most Americans are too tired or too busy to do much research on a subject like socialized medicine on their own. So they allow CNN to do their research for them trusting that the reporting is fair and balanced.
But it isn't.
Yesterday two incidents occurred around me that convinced me of my above theory.
The first happened at the graduation party of my girlfriend's little brother. While standing off to the side I overheard a conversation taking place between my girlfriend's father and a group of other men. They were bemoaning the sorry state of agriculture in America, a hot topic among men in an agriculture-dominated area like mine. They spoke of how poor farmers were and how no matter how much money in subsidies the government set aside for them it was never enough because evil corporations swooped in and ate up all the profits.
I wanted to go over to these men and point out that their perceptions just weren't accurate. The local news media (and even the national media) still play up the story of the struggling family farm and the hard-working farmer who just can't make ends meet, but that story is rare in these days if it even exists at all. Farmers in North Dakota, and the rest of the nation, receive hundreds of thousands of dollars each year directly from the government. How do I know this? Because I did a little research and found a website on the internet that allows me to look up the amount of subsidies an individual farmer receives.
If you go to that link you'll see that farmers in North Dakota received over $2.2 billion dollars in wheat subsidies alone. That's just one category. Hundreds of millions more dollars were doled out in soybean, barley, corn, sunflower, canola, livestock, flax and sugar subsidies as well. And if you do a search to find out who received this money you don't come back with corporation names, you come back with the names of individual farmers or family farms. Billions of dollars going directly to the pockets of North Dakota farmers, yet these men were sitting around talking about the poor farmers who never receive any money. And why do they feel this way? Some of them are probably the recipients of the money and have a vested interest in keeping up the image of a poor farmer, but most of them simply aren't aware of the realities of the situation and are using the talking points from a recent media story on the subject.
The second incident took place at the movie theater later that night. My girlfriend and I attended a showing of The Day After Tomorrow. My reaction is much the same as has been echoed in many other places around the internet so I'll not go into it much now other than to say that the special effects were certainly entertaining but that the plot itself was only loosely based on the realities of weather science and physics.
Yet as we were exiting the theater I heard a group of people behind me talking about how stupid it was that George Bush was over fighting in Iraq to secure more oil that, when we burned it, was just going to destroy the globe any way. Does these people really think that what happened in the movie we just watched was going to happen to our country if we don't stop using fossil fuels? Are they really that naive? Do they also really think we invaded Iraq for the oil? If such a thing were true then why are we paying over $2/gallon for gasoline? If the war in Iraq were a sinister plot designed to bring America more oil then why wouldn't the architect of that plot be bringing down gas prices at a time when it would seriously help his campaign to get re-elected?
If America had an information source that simply reported the facts and information without any sort of bias I think you'd see a major awakening among the American citizenry. Americans are not stupid, just too trusting. Too often Americans co-opt the opinions of the media elite as their own without bothering to stop and look at the realities that surround them.
I don't think Americans are stupid as much as they've been lulled to sleep by the leftist media and entertainment industry. We believe too much of what we're told on television. When CNN does a segment on socialized medicine it slants the broadcast toward the side it supports. Most Americans don't pick up on that sort of thing because most Americans are too tired or too busy to do much research on a subject like socialized medicine on their own. So they allow CNN to do their research for them trusting that the reporting is fair and balanced.
But it isn't.
Yesterday two incidents occurred around me that convinced me of my above theory.
The first happened at the graduation party of my girlfriend's little brother. While standing off to the side I overheard a conversation taking place between my girlfriend's father and a group of other men. They were bemoaning the sorry state of agriculture in America, a hot topic among men in an agriculture-dominated area like mine. They spoke of how poor farmers were and how no matter how much money in subsidies the government set aside for them it was never enough because evil corporations swooped in and ate up all the profits.
I wanted to go over to these men and point out that their perceptions just weren't accurate. The local news media (and even the national media) still play up the story of the struggling family farm and the hard-working farmer who just can't make ends meet, but that story is rare in these days if it even exists at all. Farmers in North Dakota, and the rest of the nation, receive hundreds of thousands of dollars each year directly from the government. How do I know this? Because I did a little research and found a website on the internet that allows me to look up the amount of subsidies an individual farmer receives.
If you go to that link you'll see that farmers in North Dakota received over $2.2 billion dollars in wheat subsidies alone. That's just one category. Hundreds of millions more dollars were doled out in soybean, barley, corn, sunflower, canola, livestock, flax and sugar subsidies as well. And if you do a search to find out who received this money you don't come back with corporation names, you come back with the names of individual farmers or family farms. Billions of dollars going directly to the pockets of North Dakota farmers, yet these men were sitting around talking about the poor farmers who never receive any money. And why do they feel this way? Some of them are probably the recipients of the money and have a vested interest in keeping up the image of a poor farmer, but most of them simply aren't aware of the realities of the situation and are using the talking points from a recent media story on the subject.
The second incident took place at the movie theater later that night. My girlfriend and I attended a showing of The Day After Tomorrow. My reaction is much the same as has been echoed in many other places around the internet so I'll not go into it much now other than to say that the special effects were certainly entertaining but that the plot itself was only loosely based on the realities of weather science and physics.
Yet as we were exiting the theater I heard a group of people behind me talking about how stupid it was that George Bush was over fighting in Iraq to secure more oil that, when we burned it, was just going to destroy the globe any way. Does these people really think that what happened in the movie we just watched was going to happen to our country if we don't stop using fossil fuels? Are they really that naive? Do they also really think we invaded Iraq for the oil? If such a thing were true then why are we paying over $2/gallon for gasoline? If the war in Iraq were a sinister plot designed to bring America more oil then why wouldn't the architect of that plot be bringing down gas prices at a time when it would seriously help his campaign to get re-elected?
If America had an information source that simply reported the facts and information without any sort of bias I think you'd see a major awakening among the American citizenry. Americans are not stupid, just too trusting. Too often Americans co-opt the opinions of the media elite as their own without bothering to stop and look at the realities that surround them.
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