Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a Democrat whom a Republican President named as America's ambassador to the United Nations back when we were civil and somewhat respectful in our civil discourse. He was famous for saying 'you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.'
I'm not sure how he'd feel about that were he to visit us now, here in the 2020 play-at-home-and-stay-at-home version of America, Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave. Talk about Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
It's amazing to me how quickly, with the click of a mouse any of us can find torrents of information to support any perspective or point of view we might have on any issue, great or small, and, thus fortified, can then argue with anonymous strangers on social media in ALL CAPS (which is shouting for the less tech-savvy of us) attempting to persuade them not only of the rightness of our position on whatever the issue is but to also shout them down lest their version of reality intrude into ours.
As many of us know from bitter first-hand experience, there's trouble when you wander outside the bubble so many of us build to isolate and insulate ourselves from so many others and if you don't believe me, just look around and you'll see it for yourself. But, here's the thing: we get along much better here on earth than we do in whatever reality we've created on-line.
I like to think of myself as a 'Big Picture Guy' (primarily because I get lost in the tall grass of all the details that an actual grown-up has to master and so I've grown old without actually growing up), so I find it interesting that at the micro-level, if you will, of municipal governance we can have every kind of people in elected office or serving as volunteers on one of the dozens of boards and committees we have here in Norwich and we can disagree with any of them, or even many of them, without ever being disagreeable towards each another. Maybe it's that in many ways we realize this is where we live and we have to go along to get along.
But, when you take a step back and are at the state level, we're not quite as consumed with that spirit of comity and community as we are at the local level. Where I grew up in Jersey, a state not noted for elegance or eloquence, the rule on trash-talking was always 'no Moms,' but it seems to me the longer we live in COVID-19 times, the enforcement of that rule has grown less stringent.
By the time we turn our attention to the national stage as we are now in the heat of a Presidential election, well, maybe at this moment the less we say about any of our attempts at dialogue, the better. You'd think with so much at stake, we'd measure twice before cutting once but so far we again seem to be content with a campaign of dueling sound-bytes on the news and the reduction of complex concepts and issues to something that fits on a bumper sticker.
There's an online meme I like a lot that points out 'listen' and 'silent' use the same letters and I fear that listening to learn and to understand is now a lost art. Instead, we listen to rebut and refute, and if we're lucky we might get an entire thought out of our mouths before someone interjects, interrupts, or otherwise shuts us down. We've sacrificed discussion for diatribe and demonization. And then at the end of the day, we wonder why we are where we are and look for someone to blame, instead of in the mirror.
-bill kenny
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