Plenty of people are upset at the current state of this country. In one sense, that's no surprise. People always complain. But in another sense, it seems heightened now. The Bush administration's approval rating has dropped into the high-twenties, an all time low. A lot of smart people I know constantly ask how so many people could be "so stupid" to fall for the tactics of this administration.

However, more and more, I feel the opposite is the problem. It's not that there are a lot of dumb people out there, too dim to notice the perspicuous manipulations of a devious regime. No. I'm starting more and more to think that there are too many smart people out there, controlling perception, managing spin, and manipulating representations in order to establish what the rest of us call reality. Our country is built on laws. But inherent to American culture is that whatever you can get away with to succeed is okay. Therefore, even moreso, whatever you can get away with legally to succeed is okay.

Just because something is not illegal does not make it right. Maybe insurance lawyers can find a loophole to tell someone that the insurance policy they've paid for twenty years doesn't cover their damage; maybe pharmaceutical companies can pay for pretty ads to make people ask their doctors for drugs they don't need; and maybe selling guns to Third World countries fills the coffers of this and other countries: but maybe none of those things are right.

No. We definitely have too many people keeping us busy with a surfeit of information, anesthetizing television, and sense numbing video games: while I have no objection to the content of any of these things, the problem that is it all functions to keep our attention off the things that matter. No matter one's education, every person has an instinct for what is right and wrong. But we only can care about it if we know about it. So no. Education is not the problem. How we use our educations is the problem. It's a moral problem. A matter of ethics. Choose the word you like. But something in our culture fosters those that can live without it. And that's a problem with which we all are being force to live.