Is it safer to find a place in the herd, to march over the cliff with 9 billion other lemmings or to hang back alone? Is it about fitting in? What is the survival edge in not thinking - how does it help the gene pool? I wonder.

Or is it about deference, authority, doing what you are told. Treason.

What am I allowed to think?
What others allow?
What sense is permitted?
What is reasonable?
How do I know?

We obey because otherwise we'd have to think for ourselves. Perhaps there is some advantage in the time and effort we save; thinking is hard work.

What are we allowed to think? Certainly not that we have any say in how we are pushed around. Baldacci, the Press Herald, Brookings - they're all saying we have too many towns. That we can't afford our communities. Better to centralize. This plethora of Calais, Paris, Yarmouth, Falmouth, China, Rome, Mexico and Elliott must be consolidated. Perhaps to East and West, North and South. Four is a small, comfortable number. Rt 9 will have signs pointing in all directions to motorists wishing to visit East and West, North and South.

What are we allowed to think? That we must support the troops. If only Custer had more support - more weapons, better armor, bigger cannon; then he could have killed more insurgents faster and maybe not gotten himself killed.

What are we allowed to think? What the corporate bosses let us. The Times reporting and editorial comments in the run-up to war were not mistakes, lapses in judgment, or the result of naivete. The so-called newspaper of record was pursuing a conscious policy: it wanted war in Iraq.

What we must think: that Hillary and Madeleine Albright or Barack and Zbignew Brezinski are change. 50 thousand or 100 thousand more troops. That swarthy Islamofascists are going to take our pure nation.

What are we to think when all the world around has gone mad?

That Maine has too many towns.
That Obama-Hillary means Change.
That we must widen the interstates just as truckers can no longer afford fuel.

More than being easier, there is something warm and fuzzy about ignorance.

Like that soft warm feel-good kind of democracy, where we we don't torture - or don't torture very much and not very often - and nobody white that matters. And we're serious about stopping climate change and maintaining a clean environment and providing a good education and not buying sweatshop goods. Really.

Maybe ignorance helps us deceive ourselves. Self deceived, we can continue our worldwide pillage and plunder all the while talking of a healthy environment, justice and human rights.

If so, there is no hope of a healthy environment, justice or human rights. But we will have a clean conscience.