Headlines

One of the many headlines today read something like: One in four Americans open to secession. It was, by the way, also listed as a SHOCK POLL, although it hardly seems shocking to anyone who’s been paying attention to the daily goings on. The actual figure cited in the article was 23.9%. Another headline cited a University of Pennsylvania poll as unearthing the startling find that over 40% of the Americans sampled couldn’t identify which political party controls which house of Congress. The same study found that 35% of respondents were unable to name even one of the three branches of our government. You can easily find statistics showing that only 14% of Americans approve of the job that the Congress is doing, while another headline and article point out that trust in the mass media has returned to its all time low.

A casual reading of the above mentioned pieces seems to indicate that Americans, in General, are uneducated, ill-informed, short sighted, apathetic, and easily influenced by the media and government elites. Americans, again in general, have no idea how their government works, or is supposed to work and yet they express dissatisfaction with it. Who told them that the government is dysfunctional? That question is appropriate, because the statistics and “man on the street” interviews make it clear that the general population doesn’t have a clue.

But that’s just what an average guy thinks.