What is the number one enemy of freedom?
kaworuchan
Posts: 28
It is not corrupt politicians who want it take it away. Nor it is corrupt corporations who want to take it away.
It is not the fault of any single political policy put into play by anybody in power.
It is the belief that the people are powerless. It is the lack of a "can do" attitude. It is the endless downward spiral of hopelessness that people are spiraling into as the state of the world seems to be getting worse with each passing day.
People in the US have the power to take the power back. The only things hindering them are the belief that everything is completely out of their hands, the belief that it is not their responsibility to, and the belief that we're all screwed so why bother - which are all completely false beliefs.
Too bad that way too many of them would rather watch television and whine about their problems as if that was going to help anything.
Inactivity of the citizenship - that's what people should really be afraid of.
Think about THAT little nugget of amateur political commentary for a few moments.
It is not the fault of any single political policy put into play by anybody in power.
It is the belief that the people are powerless. It is the lack of a "can do" attitude. It is the endless downward spiral of hopelessness that people are spiraling into as the state of the world seems to be getting worse with each passing day.
People in the US have the power to take the power back. The only things hindering them are the belief that everything is completely out of their hands, the belief that it is not their responsibility to, and the belief that we're all screwed so why bother - which are all completely false beliefs.
Too bad that way too many of them would rather watch television and whine about their problems as if that was going to help anything.
Inactivity of the citizenship - that's what people should really be afraid of.
Think about THAT little nugget of amateur political commentary for a few moments.
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Comments
I do not know what situation is worse. The people who choose to have no opinion, or the people who form their opinions solely based on what they watch on television or read in the mass media (and NOT based on their experiences in the real world).
I love the US, so I really do hate to admit this opinion of mine - too many of the citizens really do need to get out more. They need to turn off the cable TV and create opinions formed by the experiences in the world around them. I learned a lot of things about the world ever since I started going out into the community and seeing the world around me how it really is. You can't get that kind of information and experience from any of the major news outlets out there.
Amen, man. Amen. It goes along with my point - when people rely on the mass media as the source of all information that shapes their opinions, it is no wonder why so many people tend to feel so hopeless these days.
I may be a bit naive about these things, I may not know what I am talking about all of the time, but I seriously believe that the whole atmosphere of despair and increasing hopelessness in the US is the result of a culture of laziness. Nothing would make me happier to see more people getting involved in politics and having informed viewpoints about what they are going for - and yes, that includes the people with political views contrary to my own. I actually respect a person who actually does something to further a cause I disagree with more than a person who agrees with my political views but does nothing about it.
And it's not just news programs and documentative visual media either... i know lots of people that actually think that what comes out of hollywood nowadays is not fiction, but reality!!! How scary is that?
And the worst part about that is, the directors, writers, and producers are actually trying to make these movies and tv shows believable, in order to influence the populace!
A perfect example of this, and probably the most infamous, would be in 1953 when Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast H.G. Welles novel War of the Worlds.
If more people got off their **** and actually DID something for the communities they live in, they might actually start to learn about the way the world works.
These days, most people do not even leave the house to vote. They sit in their armchairs, with their armchair politics, fill out the absentee ballot, mail it in. They get their daily doses of misinformation sitting in their armchairs while watching television, or reading a newspaper or magazine. Such inactivity shuts them off from the rest of the world, and ignorance is the result of that.
Not sure I completely agree with your premise, but I see where you're coming from. I hardly think watching TV or reading newspapers/magazines breeds ignorance (by watching TV I don't mean American Idol or Survivor). Not doing those things certainly can breed ignorance. But I also agree with you that it couldn't hurt for me people to be engaged in their communities.
There is an article in the most recent issue of Cigar Magazine about the new federal tobacco regs and how obama relates to it. Pure hypocrisy, to say the least.
I should have made myself more clear. I am really not against people reading newspapers or watching news networks. What I really am against is people that are using them as their only source of information as to what is going on around them, which is something too many people do. They read the headlines, and a lot of them tend to form the opinions of the person writing the articles instead of doing actual research on their own, and instead of trying to form their own opinions on the matter.
So, that is where I stand on this.