Ah! The political noise and chatter that precede the November elections are already growing to a bothersome level and will only get worse as time goes on.
To help sort through the clutter, it might help to consider the following: How we vote will be decided by a combination of emotions and thinking. The emotions have been getting a lot of the attention so far. There are both the Trump and Biden Derangement Syndromes.
For various reasons, many people have what might be best described as hatred (yes-pure hatred) towards one of these two men and so they have tuned out anything he says.
There is also the emotional attachment to a single issue that causes a person to tune out considering whether any other item might be more important than their pet peeve.
Why do we limit our thinking like this? Well, it is easier to “feel” than to think. It is as simple as that. Your feelings can never be incorrect because they are the feelings that you truly have.
We see that these days, particularly on college campuses, where the mantra seems to be to protect a student’s feelings rather than to discuss what actually may be true or false.
To think is hard work. First, you must listen to and understand what others are saying; you need to logically organize the facts involved (and it takes extra effort to get all the facts); you need to check their veracity and validity (a common political trick is to throw out facts that, while true, don’t really have much to do with the issue at hand); and then apply all this to the issue under debate.
Whew! I get tired just thinking about thinking. How much easier just to say that a person is _____ (put in your own favorite words) and therefore I believe the opposite of what they are proposing rather than considering the merits or lack of merits in what they are actually saying.
Why is this so important? A former president put it this way:
But freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it, and then hand it to them with the well-taught lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.
Dick Sakulich lives in Doylestown.
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