Indeed, whether people think at all matters enormously. If the people just respond to words that are endlessly repeated by spin masters, that leads to a very different kind of country than one in which people take the trouble to inform themselves about the facts behind the rhetoric and to make up their own minds. Sound-bites do not produce a sound country. It is not enough just to show up at the polls on election day. Our inadequate and obsolete military equipment caused many young Americans to die needlessly at the beginning of World War II, because the public had not understood the need for military preparedness in the years before the war.
Some people find it too boring or too disgusting to read up on political issues and politicians.
It is not fun to get vaccinated or to have a medical examination, but we do these things anyway, because that can be the price of life itself. There is also a price to freedom. We are free today because of people buried under a sea of crosses on the beaches of Normandy and in places like Iwo Jima and Anzio. Wartime is not the only time when freedom is at stake. It is always at stake.