Sound Bites

Yesterday was a busy letter-writing day: a busy day on Face Book arguing for and against the White House and their stands on and off subjects. I enjoyed it immensely. It is what Tuesdays are all about.

But during the day a friend of mine and I hooked up with a person who was spewing the most vile, disinformative stuff I’ve ever read.  I mean this stuff was so far to the right it made Attalla the Hun look liberal. And on top of that, most of the person’s facts were so off base as to be comical, if they hadn’t been believed so devoutly.

And that is what scares me about America today.  The sound bite knowledge.

It comes from both left and right, but mostly the right as of this election, listening to bites of news or events and making wide and sweeping generalizations about a candidate or even the President of the United States.  As my friends know, I have not been so kind to the President.  I have been on his case for any number of things.  But he is our President.  He is our commander and chief, even if the Far Right had a doctored photograph of him saluting the flag with his left hand.  (Come on guys, you can do better than that.  Photoshop is too easy to trace.) So when I attack him, it is from a basis of fact. Not from sound bites.

But it is that very picture and the ensuing debate over it that I am talking about.  We are listening to itty, bitty pieces of crap and making them into major news items.  They are not.  Or, we are hearing a news story from only one point of view and thinking the President is trying to rid America of all religious freedom– as an example.  He is not.  (The Catholics want to have schools and hospitals and orphanages, and trusts associations that employee all manner of people from the public sector, so they must offer universal health insurance for their employees.  That is also true for Baptist institutions, Methodist, Muslim and Atheist institutions. You can’t discriminate in coverage just because you play football for the Pope.) It is not about religious freedom.  It is about equal rights and equal access. But the uproar it has caused, you’d think Obama wants to take Jesus off the cross in every church in America. No, he just wants to make sure that people who work for any institution, regardless who owns it, gets equal access to complete health care.

But the sound bites were rampant. “He’s ruining religion in America.” “He is anti-Christian.”  “He has three horns in his head.”  And the person with whom my friend and I were debating was engaging us with all this nonsense, to the point that you could not make a rational case of or for anything.  I mean anything. Water runs downhill.  “No, that is a socialistic trick of the elite science community to make us believe that gravity is a force to be reckoned with.” (I made that up, but you get the point.)

Logic is out the door in America’s political (and  unfortunately in some intellectual) space. The foundation of logic – facts – have been replaced by the sound bite, the small moment of one person making a statement that sounds true, but may be off the charts on the false side. Yet there is no one to challenge them.

And that worries me about America and the real issues we face.

So what are the big issues facing us? Forget family values, the gays have ruined all that by raising healthy, attractive, productive children right in the midst of us.  Forget the organized attack on life-stealing abortions, the social media out cry against SGK saw to it that argument is silent for a while (maybe for good). Forget about a strong military, or campaign finance reform, Democrats have taken those issues up and away from the elitist right wing. Forget about global warming, Rick Santorum has told us it isn’t real. The thing that truly worries me is that the arguments we make on each side of the questions, which face us have nothing to do about what is good for America, but rather what is good for “my” position.

So let us all, take a moment and consider this: I may not have all the facts.  I should begin a session of discussion by first listening. The other guy might just know something I don’t know.  At the least, I can find out how stupid he or she is, by what comes out of their mouth.  If it is more sound bite crap, I’ll just walk away and suggest they talk with themselves. For that is the only audience that will eventually find them credible. 

Truth will always win out. I just hope sooner rather than later.