Part of me is always saying "don't demonize the opposition, work to understand them." "Don't just call them stupid, that's counterproductive . . ."
However, just READ the summaries of these studies conducted by PIPA, the Program on International Policy Attidudes. (Read the article under "What's New" on the main page.) Bush supporters are, especially, incredibly incredibly misinformed, and (from my own experience) it does feel like a willful ignorance, an arrogant, determined ignorance in many cases.
And if you say, "well, that's the media's fault, too," I agree, definitely. But I don't think that's all there is to it. I'm sure it has something to do with our power in the world. Noam Chomsky once said, "The more power and privilege you have, the less you have to think, because you can just do what you want."
There's something stupid-making about the kind of power we have, at the moment. I fundamentally believe that. We don't perceive ourselves as paying a price for our actions--and, in fact, we often aren't the ones paying the price for our decisions, our bad habits. We have cheap oil and make/purchase huge gas guzzling cars even as the oceans are rising and the weather is dramatically changing. We kill and maim a hundred thousand people in Iraq to continue servicing our addiction to that cheap oil, and only lose a thousand or so impoverished soldiers and reservists, who would have probably just lived a life of grinding poverty here, anyway.
So, the band plays on and we all decide life boats aren't really that important, and besides they take up too much space on deck ... iceberg, schmiceberg. |
