We, the people of the United States, despite our status as one of the most technologically advanced nations on the face of the earth, remain among the most ignorant about the world we live in. And yet we continue to hold forth that we have some sort of divine right of intervention, where a nation of some 300 million is self-empowered to dictate to billions of others the terms in which we all coexist on the planet. We seem shocked when things don't go as we envisioned (take Iraq, for example, where song and flowers were rapidly replaced by bombs and bullets), but in the end we have only ourselves to blame. Our ignorance of the world we live in seems to be only exceeded by our near total abrogation of our duties and responsibilities as citizens of the world's foremost representative democracy.   more »