Carl Sagan's 1995 Warning About America's Economy and Media

He wrote the following back in 1995, and we quote, "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 America

is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in

the enormously influential media.

The 30-second soundbites 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."