What Do People Think, Really?

We get a certain skewed view of the world if we just talk to our friends, or if we just get the news from TV, or ... if we read the comments section at the Teach the Facts blog. So it's good to check on a legitimate public opinion survey every once in a while, just as a gauge of how people are feeling, really.

Being nonpartisan here, we're going to skip over the political results of the latest AP-Ipsos Public Affairs Poll. OK, I'll tell you: people don't like the President or his Congress. No more details on that. There is some other interesting stuff in this survey -- sometimes it's just good to know what people really think out there.

They asked people if they believed "things in this country are heading in the right direction, or are they off on the wrong track?"

67 percent said wrong track, 30 percent said right direction. This was actually a nonsignificant shift in the optimistic direction since last month. Can you imagine that? Two-thirds of people disapprove of the direction the country is going. So, in a democracy, you might wonder ... why is it going that direction?

I'm not going to try to answer that question.

A kind of interesting result turned up when they asked people what they thought was "the most important problem facing the USA today." Clearly, war is on people's minds: 22 percent said "war" was our worst problem; of those, 14 percent specifically said "war with Iraq," and another 8 percent of them said "wars, unrest throughout the world." Immigration (9 percent) was seen as a more important problem than terrorism (7 percent). Overall, 42 percent of people thought foreign affairs issues such as these were our most important problems.

22 percent listed domestic issues. The biggest was "political leaders," which 9 percent reported as our most important problem, followed by "energy crisis" at 8 percent, morality at 4 percent, and education at 3 percent. I think I understand the "political leaders" thing; "energy crisis" probably has to do with paying fifty dollars to fill your tank; we'll come back to morality.

Finally, 14 percent of people thought the economy was our most important problem, in particular 9 percent listed "economy (unspecified)," whatever that really means. It might mean, "I personally have a job, I am able to pay my bills, but I don't understand how the country is paying for these wars and things, or when this is all going to come back and bite us."

OK, here's where my eye goes. Four percent of people think that "morality" is our biggest problem. It doesn't look like anybody reported "the gay agenda," or "condoms," or even "premarital sex" as a particularly important problem, and this is less than half the number of people who thought our political leaders are our worst problem.

I wonder who responded with "morality," and what they meant. If you caught me in a certain mood, I might say that morality is our country's most important problem. The idea that research that could save thousands of lives should be blocked on a theological technicality is immoral, torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners of war is immoral, attack and occupation of nonthreatening third-world countries is immoral, corporate greed and lying is immoral, destroying the environment is immoral, spying on citizens' private conversations without a search warrant is immoral ... you see what I'm saying? Immorality really is the central theme in this day and age. To me, it's our biggest problem, really.

I wonder how many of the "morality" responses were people like me, and how many were your garden-variety CRC-type knee-jerk moralizers.

Even if you figure that none of them were answering like I would have ... four percent. How can four percent of the population cause so much trouble?