I think it’s easy to say “I would rather just watch TV or escape into celebrity culture or the undemanding idiocy of reality TV in order to distract myself and turn inward away from the world." We live in a culture that has been conditioned to retreat from social issues, define citizenship as an act of individualized consumption, and embrace the worst forms of anti-intellectualism and ignorance. The result is a society that embraces civic illiteracy and the most egregious forms of ignorance, and for the most part is quite happy to immerse itself in orbits of private pleasure while ignoring the larger issues regarding justice, ethics, social responsibility, power and politics. We are in a very dangerous cultural and political moment in the United States right now -- one that basically makes me very depressed, though far from paralyzed intellectually and politically.