Greg, I was using the term "justification" in the sense of "an explanation for a certain action or belief." I did not say that it excuses it. I am constantly yelling about the responsibility of citizens to be well-informed.

My point was that a vast portion of the citizenry is so busy just trying to make ends meet in today's economy that they have little time or energy left over to pay much attention to things outside their immediate sphere. What news they get usually comes from the car radio as they are commuting to work or trying to get to the day-care center in time to pick up the kid before they have to pay for an extra hour. If they have a chance to watch the evening news at all, it's probably the local news channel, where they can get a few national and international sound-bites, a little local news, the weather, and the sports. And the news they do pick up is questionable at best. Then into the sack to rest up for tomorrow's grind.

Most people don't have the resources that I do, for example. I'm retired, so I have the leisure time to read books and magazines (I'm currently reading The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy by William Greider), listen to NPR, watch CSPAN and CSPAN2, and cruise through cyberspace and read stories from news services in different countries and comparing the veracity of the various reports. In an ideal world, we would all have the time and energy to be well-informed. In an ideal world, we would not have the Bush administration.

In countries like France, as I understand it, there are laws preventing employers from requiring people to work more than thirty-five hours a week and they must be allowed five or six weeks of vacation per year. Damned civilized, those French! In these circumstances, there is no justification for not being a well-informed citizen.

Don Firth