Wal-Mart wisdom

Citizen shoppers aren't overly worried about federal snoops project | Joel Belz

It had been well over a year since I'd dropped by the local Wal-Mart for one of my occasional opinion surveys. And I was more and more irritated by what seemed to me to be a lopsided focus by the mainstream media on President Bush's use of secret wiretaps in the war on terrorism. So what better way, I thought, to discover what ordinary Americans really think than to ask them face-to-face?

I was absolutely direct with 50 different shoppers over a two-hour time frame. "Are you personally concerned," I asked each one, "about the possibility that the federal government might be listening in on your phone calls? That's been in the news a lot, you know."

They knew. Not a single one of the 50 people I talked to seemed in the dark about the issue, and that surprised me. Yet what surprised me even more was the superficiality of their answers—on both sides of the question. Most of the responses tended to be accompanied with some variation of a look of dismay that said: "You're not really taking this stuff seriously, are you?"