Words of a Prophet in 1995

"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 is true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (my comment: Wow! I forgot how long the sound bites were; YouTube now has 6 second ads), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentation on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." -- Carl Sagan (from his 1995 Best seller "The Demon-Haunted World -- Science as a Candle in the Dark")