Between the idea and the reality falls the Shadow

Stories like this, more than anything else, are why I think America needs a reality check of really epic proportions. "$200 million a day" is right up there with the death camps, the communism, the Kenyan birth certificates, the Hitler-frenzy, and all the other drivel that politicians, newscasters and ordinary people are agonizing over; looking back at that list (and it goes on and on and on), I am astonished and saddened by just how easy it is to manipulate and mislead the American public these days.

In general, I find the hatred, venom and oh-so-thinly-veiled racism that's spewed out into the airwaves to be offensive, hurtful and counterproductive. But what's worse is that so many people this country - everyone from the "ordinary Americans" to members of Congress - just sit there with their mouths open like baby birds and blindly swallow it all whole. I mean, honestly. If you bother to think logically even for five minutes (yes, I know it's hard), over half the shit you read on the internet and hear on television (often touted as the word of God Himself) seems patently ridiculous. Just because Sarah Palin tweeted it or Glenn Beck yelled about it or Jon Stewart mocked it or Arianna Huffington posted it (yes, it goes both ways, look at that) doesn't mean it's true. (I suspect that Stewart and Huffington have more reliable/competent handlers and fact checkers, and not because I agree with their politics but because of their track records.) The point is that these people are still as fallible as the rest of the human race - and they have an agenda on top of it.

I realize that shit like this goes hand in hand with freedom of speech. But you know what also should go hand in hand with freedom of speech? Freedom of thought. The realization that just because it's been "reported" on television doesn't make it true. Pull your heads out of the sand and spare two minutes for some critical thinking, please. There's no one policing the airwaves or the internet, so it's our job to police our minds and opinions, to make conscious decisions about which sources we trust and believe. All I'm left with is the question of how some people manage to live their entire lives without learning this simple lesson, and why these self-titled "government watchdogs" don't spend a little more time watching their facts and a little less time reciting incorrect ones. (The answer, by the way, is that no one calls them out on it - and when someone does, they're painted as the "liberal media" (which as far as I can tell means any news source not preceded by the word "Fox") and ignored.)

So watch Fox News, watch the Daily Show, read Drudge and the HuffPo and whatever else you want to read. But when their opinions start to become facts accepted on blind faith - when it transitions from "sometimes it's nice to hear other people who share your views" to "it's so much easier to let Sean Hannity think for me" - that's when we're in real trouble. As a country, we need to re-learn how to think for ourselves; we used to be good at it, but oh how the mighty have fallen.



"When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it."
Thomas Friedman, November 16, 2010