In recent years, I've taken to gathering much of my news and information from a variety of online and/or physical television and/or video and/or newsprint. The platform isn’t as important to me as the content, and I'm giving away my age when I tell you how much I enjoy my morning coffee with a side of newsprint or local tv news and how sad I get watching the disappearance of independent news sources leaving us, whether we know or care at all, in an information desert.
I suspect the decline started before we came up with 'fake news' for anything we disagreed with, and I fear we’ll soon need a new pejorative because that one has and lost its sting from overuse.
I don't require news to come with analysis which is just captioning for those with critical-thinking deficits. Just give me the facts and I'll draw my own conclusions. I dressed myself this morning (you, too?) so I'm confident we can understand basic cause and effect dynamics and relationships, be they foreign policy or economic growth without a panel discussion or interpretative dance. (But thanks for the offer).
Except...when our information sources just feed and fuel our own beliefs, it's silly if not suicidal to then be surprised that we can't seem to create and sustain a consensus on an issue, any issue, from public health to public safety, and I worry about who we are becoming.
“E pluribus unum” (‘from many, one') was replaced by 'Ego hic loquitur!' (I'm talking here!). When did this happen and more importantly, why? When you read our history, we seem so possessed, purposeful, confident and driven. We also had a great deal of good luck from the beginning.
We stumbled towards and into Independence--some of the Founders who traveled to Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 weren't firebrands yearning to be free. Others may have gotten hijacked on their way to the Jersey Shore—but they at least got their gym, tan, and laundry accomplished. The rest, as they, was history. Lots of sparks and heat but greater amounts of light, so bright that to this day it illuminates the path we walk.
We have been and hopefully will always be a nation of strivers, of seekers, of what happens if I put some of your peanut butter on my chocolate questioners. Here, you try it and tell me what you think. There’s a lot to be said for sapiosexuality and at one point we were the world’s pin-up poster.
And part of who we are is the not-giving-up, the-how-does-this-part-go-on-to-that-part questioning until we figure it out. And we don’t take no for an answer (Sometimes our problem is we don’t take yes either).
We're a nation of loudmouths (I got a megaphone one year for my birthday and used it to demand pony rides for my next one) who don't always listen to each other's words but who, at the end of the day used to be able to look into one another's eyes and see the heartbeat behind the polemic and understand the person with whom we are disagreeing isn't evil or ignorant, but just different. And they were looking at us the same way.
So,
what happened?
And when do we start to fix our problems instead of arguing over who created them?
-bill kenny
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