We went crazy over terrorism? Who's we? Am I part of the we that helped pass the PATRIOT Act (which was an Act of Congress) without reading it? Am I the one wh

We went crazy over terrorism? Who's we? Am I part of the we that helped pass the PATRIOT Act (which was an Act of Congress) without reading it? Am I the one who pitched Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction to justify an invasion of an irrelevant country that resulted in ~125,000 dead civilians? Am I the one who has been helping build the system that has devalued an American college degree to the point of worthlessness? Did I decide to over-advertise the college experience to impressionable kids? Did I decide to give more student loan money to college students? Did I decide to raise the cost of my university to account for said federal dollars that I can now obtain out of greed? Of course there's a bleeting majority supporting all of this. They're, like all citizens in a democracy, only as good as the media they're fed: http://fsi.stanford.edu/publications/how_to_subvert_democracy_montesinos_in_peru http://fsi.stanford.edu/publications/how_to_subvert_democrac... But many of the policies and actions are coming from a higher-level than your average citizen. EDIT: However, I agree that the stupidity and apathy of the general populace is at least partly to blame. The people who know what's up ahead of time aren't confident enough to act until it's obvious, in which case it's usually too late. The rest just don't care and assume someone else will solve the problem. Further, following trends and the subsequent inability to make it through a turbulent or confusing time without devolving into mass panic and animal-like behavior is also a problem.