After two years of more of less isolation, perhaps we’ve all fallen into our own personal echo chambers.
It’s not intentional. It’s simply what happens in isolation. There will be those who say we’ve not been isolated because we have the internet and the news, etc. But we have been isolated from people and friends who challenge our beliefs.
It’s the personal interactions, it’s the people we care about, our friends, family, etc. who add balance to our thoughts and opinions. Without those people challenging us, we fall into patterns where it’s far too easy to self validate what we think and as humans do, we assume that we’re right.
COVID has provided a perfect storm in this regard.
No matter how egalitarian we try to be in our news absorption we inevitably develop biases and preferred news sources. It could happen because those sources have pretty people, or entertaining pieces, or that they simply validate what we’re already thinking. Eventually we choose those sources that we’re comfortable with. Then we narrow our focus to only the comfortable.
Without discussion and interaction. Without people we respect and care about pushing back and saying, “Well this report here says thus and such,” it’s easy to create an echo chamber and not notice it.
I’m guilty… Are you?
That’s not about laying blame. None of us should feel threatened by this realization. It’s just a sign post that says, “Hey there, we need to do better.” None of us are perfect, but we all should at least aspire to keep walking that path and get as close as possible.
The problem with echo chambers is they feed division. Everyone walks around with their own entrenched beliefs and they defend them.
How many people have said, or been heard to say, “You are wrong and I don’t want to be friends anymore,”? Isn’t that the same as a dating profile saying “Republicans don’t contact me,”
That’s not healing, that’s not being open minded. It’s in the discussion of even closely held beliefs that validation, or error is uncovered. Sometimes neither validation or error is uncovered but the discussion provides enlightenment.
The enlightenment I’m talking about is understanding what drives the core belief. For example. Just because someone was tried for a crime and there was nothing uncovered in a trial that was legally actionable. It doesn’t mean there was nothing there in the first place. It may mean that someone was skating along the boundaries of the law and they were clever enough or lucky enough to stay just out of reach.
Al Capone is a good example. For years the FBI and other law enforcement knew Capone was in charge of a massive criminal organization. They could never actually pin anything on him directly. They didn’t have sufficient evidence and no matter how many times they arrested Capone, the case always fell apart. Until the IRS got involved. Then it was a whole new ball game.
Maybe, a way forward for all of us, is to have those uncomfortable discussions. But both parties really need to listen.
That’s the hard part, listening and divorcing yourself from your beliefs for a time. That way, you can get into the head of the other person thereby understanding the factual or not so factual underpinning of why they believe a certain way about something.
It doesn’t matter if you agree or not with their belief. What matters is that we all acknowledge that no-one is an idiot for thinking in a way we don’t agree with. It’s just that we each put “facts” together in some kind of order that makes it possible to cope with the world around us.
I’ve written in these pages that I personally think something was amiss in the most recent election. For that matter I could make a case that something has been amiss in elections going back decades.
When I’ve said that I thought the most recent election should be investigated. It wasn’t to depose Biden and install Trump. I honestly don’t care about which of the two is president.
I’m not even sure if constitutionally Biden could be removed at this point. I don’t even want to consider the chaos that removing a Biden Administration and installing a Trump Administration would cause. I guess I’m more of a, “Well, we’re here now, we just have to muddle through,” we have to do better next time. I don’t like Biden. I personally think he’s incompetent, but Harris is no better.
I as a voter, don’t like being placed in a situation where I feel that I have to choose the devil or the deep blue sea.
That doesn’t mean that I’m pro Trump. I personally think that he did some things that were beneficial for the country in the near term but I don’t have enough knowledge of politics to be able to project how those near term benefits play out over time. I’m willing to acknowledge that perhaps the folks who were screaming about his policies know, or knew something I missed.
When I say I think we should look at the elections, I’m saying that from a perspective of fixing what’s broken.
How do we change the system to make sure that the next election, everyone feels confident enough in the system that they believe the results represent the will of the electorate? I’d like for everyone to be able to comfortably say, “I didn’t like the result but that’s okay, because the system was fair and it works.“
I’d be willing to bet that average folks on both sides of the political gulf could get behind that. The politicians might not like it all that much, but the people they’re supposed to represent might like it a lot.
It hit me, that folks might not understand the nuance I’m talking about. I’d like to see a disassembly of the voting process to find the bugs and plug them. That would be a big task, and it would take representation from all parties, not just the big two. That’s also why I’m in the near term pro voter ID.
I’m not about preventing someone from casting their vote. I am about preventing someone from casting 20 votes. Yes, it would be inconvenient to have to present ID to obtain a ballot. but the benefit outweighs the inconvenience. God knows, I remember how slow it was to write a check and present ID in the grocery store line.
I’d like to see the next election, be clean. I’d like for there to be no margin for a candidate to do what Trump did this last election. We should remember that before Trump, there was Al Gore claiming the election irregularities.
Folks call it “The Big Lie”. I call it a warning sign. How about we figure out a way to eliminate the possibility of “The Big Lie” altogether? That seems like a worth while enterprise doesn’t it?
I’m amazed how many people have Trump living in their heads rent free. I’d prefer to push him into history and deal with what is in front of us. Yes, I acknowledge that Trump is living in my head rent free too. I try very hard to only let him have a cheap studio apartment with a leaky toilet. It’s hard to do because there’s so much media attention still focused on him.