(One hour cultural event) Avatar and binary logic

I finally got around to seeing Avatar last week and besides the 3-d visual effects I couldn't stop thinking about how they always have one good side and one bad side. It makes me think of how Professor Bourgalt was talking about binary logic in class. Why do we only have one good side and one bad side? Aren't we smart enough to know that issues are not just black and white? I feel that when we limit life to two options much is missed. Issues of politics and life are complex. When watching Avatar I was struck by the American general. I have the image of him with his coffee mug engrained in my head. "Lets get 'em, he says while going to destroy the Na'vi people.

I know that addressing issues like these in Avatar simplifies things but I'm nervous that this way of distributing information makes us think less. I find this approach to be quite offensive to its people. Are you simplifying the information because we can't understand? I think all humans have the potential to be very smart so why all this "dumbed down" information? If we talk about issues in a complicated way it reveals the nature of the issues. Whereas when you say are you with them or against them, you instantly pick sides. How can you pick a side if you've only seen what happens on the surface. What irks me the most is that so many people rush to have an opinion when having very little real knowldege on an issue. If we continue to simplify all of our important information into a binary then we are missing the richness of complicated issues. I feel that this is the problem with our media today. They give us the American side of every story and their news stories are two minutes long and lack a real context of the events they are talking about. This makes the viewers think they know whats going on, but really we don't know much at all without looking at multiple news sources which requires people to do a little research on our own. In todays world, sadly, that's asking too much of the everyday person. So in the end our average american says they know whats going on in the world, but that just from our simplified, opinionated newscasters. If we don't change soon are we all going to dumb ourselves down to this type of information and take it as truth without any personal investigation?Or have we done so already?