Those costs are fearsome, and those costs are paid by the most vulnerable among us. Those costs are not paid by the well fed, well clothed, privileged environmental extremists who mostly live in wealthy western countries, who travel around those wealthy countries in modern transportation mobilizing equally well fed, equally well clothed, and equally privileged masses of ignorant, hysterical people into often violent protest against biotechnology. Global population control is a cause c l bre among the sleek elite who have nothing better to do. It's a mystery, nobody knows why, but no matter. We're all doomed.
Fear rules the day.
We are a nation sliding inexorably into ignorance and mediocrity . When this country was founded more than 200 years ago, the literacy rate in America was higher than any other place in the western world. After the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, published, in the popular press, a series of articles called The Federalist , for the purpose of stimulating public discussion about the nuances of the new Constitution. The relative merits of republic versus democracy was debated from taverns to state legislatures. Many elected legislators today, presumably knowledgeable about our form of government because of their positions, actually think that we live in a democracy, and would probably be hard-pressed to explain the difference.