Carl Sagan seemed prophetic in his prediction of where the U.S. was heading. Unfortunately, he hit the nail on the head.
Carl Sagan proves prophetic
MSNBC’s Brian Williams referred to a piece with a Carl Sagan message about Star Wars that Dr. Jason Johnson found in his Twitter feed. He then read a prescient quote from Sagan’s book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” that follows.
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
The above quote is what we have been talking about for some time now. America currently continues on that path. Most importantly, we must acknowledge that America will likely continue on that path unless we have independent media and activists to mitigate the willful, deliberate, and purposeful misinforming of Americans. It is an uphill battle but a winnable battle many of us intend to win.