and not knowing the meaning of fighting for survival, in any true sense of the word, has made a vast number of the voting population in the U.S. ignorant and/or indifferent.
Note, I say the voting population, because I believe there is a non-voting population here that are beaten down by the system in their fight for survival. These people have no belief left that they can  fight for change. We who still have fight in us need to teach that each of us have the right to be an active part of government, not the victims of governing.  This non-voting sector are people who don't have a credit card to their name, their credit was probably trashed long ago by medical bills that they couldn't pay.  They live from month to month in inadequate housing or homeless.  It is these people who really know what the issues in this country are, and it is these people that politicians want to keep stifled and victimized by the government.

Sometimes it takes losing everything and having your spirit beaten down to spark that desire to battle for survival. I have found this to be true in my personal life, and I see it to be true politically in countries such as Bolivia, Venezuela, and the Ukraine.  People in these countries do know what it means to fight to have next to nothing and fight to  survive.  In the U.S., a majority of people don't care about who worked in slave labor for the clothes they put on their charge card, or the politics and death behind that tank of gas for their Hummers. By the time this sector of society loses enough to wake up and care it could be too late for democracy in the U.S.

Honest, unfiltered media is a major tool in effectively changing this pattern. The internet opened up a great channel for authentic journalism.  But, here in the U.S. we are working on ways to get true media channeled from the internet and out to those who don't have the benefit of access to a computer.  
This last week proved more than ever how essential this task is. Friday arrived before I could stomach watching television news or read a newspaper covering the inauguration.  The rubbish I found was what I expected.  If any protests were mentioned they were minimized, and implications were made that protesters were a terrorist threat, as discussed in this Media Matters article. These pictures document what are government controlled media did not have the integrity to honestly report to this nation.  

Whitney brilliantly observes that "How quickly we forget that deep, substantive change has only ever come from below, the grassroots."  It is my personal goal to work with any tools possible to reach the real grassroots, not the spoiled, selfish and ungrateful sector that put Bush in office for another four years. Democracy in the U.S. failing will be a domino effect, tumbling democracies globally with their power.  That is something we should all fear, and do whatever is neccesary to implement a "deep, substantive change."