Good post.
And that's what I try to do everyday. The first step is knowledge. When you're informed about the situation you can form a plan to take appropriate action. Right now, and from what I can tell the past 50-60 years primarily, it's been a shift from a population of somewhat knowledgable people to no emphesis on public education at all in any successful sense. We had the big scientific boom in the 50's and 60's that led to landing on the moon. Now we've got a population of people who don't really care about knowing things. People that want to learn or understand something that might not have any impact on them directly are few and far between, definitely a dime a dozen. Genuine curiosity about just random stuff is almost non existent in todays population, with distractions like the media and celebrities, Ipods and the Real World... Almost nobody knows how money works. Almost nobody knows how the president is elected. Almost nobody knows who their state senators are... Almost nobody knows who the first 5 American presidents are... Almost nobody knows or can name the continents, almost nobody knows how DNA works, almost nobody knows the names of people who have contributed huge pieces of the puzzle in science... I could go on and on.. Really important shit that, to me, is actually really pretty interesting, almost and at some times fun to learn and know about... But daily life is too much of a distraction for the main priority to be focused on the future, so everyone is so focused on the present, except by looking towards the future, we can solve the problems we currently face...