Thoughts on July 4th Weekend 2014

As we focus on this wonderful country of ours this Fourth of July weekend, these thoughts come to my mind.  With your permission, I'd like to share them with you.

The beginning of a political or social action begins with the core—the person or entity who creates it.  They put forth their agenda which may or may not be forthcoming and straightforward.  We’ve all heard of hidden agendas.  Think of it as a pebble that is tossed onto the surface of a calm lake.  That pebble falls into the spot of the core idea and generates ever-widening circles of information and action.

The first circle is comprised of people who assist those at the core like their staff or PR people.  They disseminate that information to the next circle of people who might be further staff or maybe media types who may disseminate it to more media.

It’s somewhere after the third circle of this process, perhaps, that the information gets to the general public, John Doe, if you will, aka you and me.

At every step in this process, the reception of the information and the passing along of that information is colored by the individual agenda and life experience of those involved in the process.  It’s an inherent part of the process.  We can’t help it.  Who we are dictates how we perceive information and how we then share it with others.

At the point where the information hits the commercial media, another important factor comes into play.  That media person is charged in every case with provoking emotion in their audience.  So, the information gets a shot in the arm so that the media person can get a bigger rating and earn more money for themselves and their employer.  I would guess here is where the biggest distortion of the information occurs.  Even those who are closer to being altruistic journalists have reason to intensify the information to push their point, often because it is such a worthy issue.

After the media puts their heightened and usually wonky spin on the information, we common folk get our crack at it.  By this time, the information is more emotion than substance.  The real facts have been carved away and the information whittled down to fit into sound bites for the abbreviated teasers of a future news broadcast.  Sadly, the later broadcast will most likely not embellish the teaser in a meaningful, informative way.

The written word provided online or in printed form will likely leave out facts not favorable to the stance of the author, editor, or news entity.  So, while printed versions are lengthier, they might not be any more informative than the headline news on broadcast media.

It is at this point in the process that each of us makes the choice of which side of the issue we’re going to take a stand for.  Many of us speak with true authority like we know exactly what we’re talking about, confident that we have the truth of the matter when we’re really just parroting the seriously diluted and strongly biased version we’ve heard or read.  Our source of information is at least two to three circles removed from the core of the action and probably much further away but many of us speak as if we got our information straight from the oracle.

Then, we square off against one another and post stuff online and text and Twitter and put forth our ideas while watching social media as it keeps score so we can see who’s “winning”.  The information providers in the circles between us and the core are also watching the social media so that they can further distort the information to sway the score in their favor.

Don’t get me wrong, I have very strong opinions about many of the issues in our news and I have written posts in various forums and venues online only to delete them before I post them.  Why?  Because I realize that in this circle, sadly, we are not really debating the issues.  We’re debating the distorted devolutions of the issues as they exist when they reach our circle.  And most of us aren’t debating the issues to come to common ground for compromise and resolution but to see who can be the cleverest at berating the opposing view.  Then, there are those who don’t even go for being clever but just say mean and hateful things about the people who hold opposing views.

Some days I am horrified at what I see happening because of this dynamic running rampant in this country.  Wonderful, sane, emotionally healthy people are supporting issues that are clearly triggering absolutely insane behaviors.

I didn’t plan to get issue-specific in this piece but the open carry stuff is blowing my mind.  I can’t believe that we’ve come to the place where a mature, educated person in this country would believe it to be okay to go into a public place with an assault weapon or for that matter any weapon whose sole purpose is to deliver bodily harm.  Why on earth would that EVER be an acceptable behavior in our society?  That someone would even attempt to explain why it would be okay totally confounds me.

But that’s what I’m talking about here.  We’ve let issues get so ridiculous that we’re doing outrageous things to bolster our individual beliefs to the detriment of the fabric of our society.  It’s like that crazy argument against same sex marriage that people used to put out.  “Well, if we let people start marrying same sex partners, the next step will be for someone to marry a goat.”  Let’s see, a quick Google tells me that 19 states have legalized same sex marriage.  Another quick Google didn’t turn up any legitimate moves to legalize human/animal uniting in matrimony. 

Sorry if you’re reading this hoping that I have some answers.  See, that’s the point.  It’s not a matter of someone coming up with an “answer”.  It’s a matter of us all committing to working together to improve this country for us all.  It seems that so many people are working from a place of fear—fear that they will be forced to do something they don’t want to do, fear that they will be taken over by forces that will strip them of their basic rights, fear that if someone deviates in the slightest from their belief system that proves the system has no value, fear that they are going to lose everything unless they cling to ideas that in a saner time would be obviously insane.

Oh, you know what?  I do have one idea and that’s to throw out the cubbyholes that we try to fit each other into.  Maybe I have another idea, too, that we try to look to each other for common ground instead of puffing out our collective chest and beating it while putting forth our own ideas about why our individual differences are better than someone else’s.  Face it, we’re all living in the same space and it’s constantly getting more crowded.  The more we look to get along and keep this space safe for everyone, the happier we will all be in the long run.  We need to evacuate the extremes of the spectrums and move more towards the middle ground where we can appreciate what we all have in common and enjoy the diversities in peace.  That would be a truly noble grassroots movement independent of any political party affiliation.