Taking It At Face Value

A couple years ago, Adam went on a two-week deployment with the Navy and was put up in barracks with several other servicemembers. Adam arrived at the barracks first, and, on a whim, decided to try an experiment. He gathered the pillows from all the beds and proceeded to place them at the foot of each of the beds. Based on the arrangement, location and positioning of the beds, it was obvious where the "head" and "foot" of each bed were. However, as Adam had predicted, all of his roommates upon entering the room, lay down on the bed foot-to-head in agreement with where the pillow was placed. None of them questioned their sleeping arrangement, not even when Adam was sleeping in the complete opposite (and arguably, the "right") direction. Now some might say that Adam is weird or had too much time on his hands. He would say that he was proving a theory--that people are all too often ready to just accept what is told or shown to them. Sure, the direction you sleep in is a relatively trivial issue; however, it could be said that this is indicative of a much larger issue at hand. In short, people don't question the situation they are placed in, and subsequently, we become a very complacent people.

Americans, I've found, don't always see the value in travelling outside of the country. We have a beautiful nation, no doubt, but one of the best things about seeing the rest of the world is learning how others see you, and how they see themselves. I was abundantly surprised during my time living in England by how Brits and other Europeans are much more likely to challenge the information their news media and politicians feed them. I once heard that in France, the government fears the people more than the people fear the government, but that it's the opposite in the U.S. One example of this is bioengineered foods, or GMOs (genetically modified organisms). I had never even heard of such a thing until I lived overseas. One of my French friends told me how Americans eat foods that are spliced and diced with different genes (for example, tomatoes that are engineered with bovine growth hormones). I was repulsed by the idea, but had no idea what he was talking about. Europeans not only are aware of GMO's, but refuse to eat them, and require their governments to identify genetically modified foods. Why don't we as Americans demand this of our Food and Drug Administration? Are we that trusting of our government? Do we not care what we eat? Or are we too lax to demand the information that we deserve to know? I often wonder why we are so ready to just take things at face value, why we fail to question, look deeper, seek the truth, not just the truth-as-they-tell-us. Are we really that afraid to find things out for ourselves? Or are we just that lazy?