As Dumb as we Wanna be?

Or as dumb as we can be without inconveniencing ourselves?
Either way is no good. As Thomas L. Friedman writes in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded, Americans are the proud owners of the right to be as dumb as we wanna be.
As a nation we are so content with doing the bare minimum to get results, that we have developed a national inclination to take the easy way out, to allow news shows to supply us with opinions as readily as we are supplied with Big Mac's at Mc Donalds, we've become a country populated by people with "drive-through" opinions, mass produced to tell us what to think.
Millions and Millions served, no one particularly fufilled.
People are no longer required to be intelligent or intellectual, or to think for themselves, so they don't. To me it is disquieting that people with the ability to have opinions, don't have anything to say, because they are not required to have anything intelligent to say, they don't get points for knowing what they think, it is as if an opinion and the right to say what you think and feel, was an extra credit assignment, instead of a basic human right.
The real go getters go for it, but the majority are content to slide by.