'Paying Attention'
To most U.S. Citizens, politics is too slow and
boring to stay involved because it takes sometimes long
periods of time to accomplish things. Unfortunately our
attention deficit in this area has come to haunt us in that
a government which is not overseen by its people will
take advantage of them and their complacency by
enriching themselves and increasing their power. We
must again force ourselves to make the difficult choice
and choose the uphill battle to get back control of our
runaway government to the point where it again
understands its purpose is to work for us instead of their
self perceived purpose of doing what they think is best
for us.
The difference in these two purposes is drastically
different and we are now seeing what living under a
system based on the latter feels like. The latter includes
an obvious assumption of intellectual superiority on their
part and I do not know about you but this citizen does
not like it. I am starting to feel more and more like being
boxed in or herded into doing things and following so
many government mandated regulations and guidelines
it is beginning to affect me. I am feeling less like a free
citizen of my country and more like a controlled subject
whose purpose is to produce and consume for the good
of the federal government and its needs and goals. Our
government should not have needs and goals other than
providing for security against our enemies, and helping
its citizens increase their freedom and standard of living.
What is going on now is not the American Way.
This may be an agreeable way to govern in other
countries around the world but not here in the United
States. This is the destination where people go when
they do not want to live under that type of system. We
have to stop this from happening here because we
unfortunately have no sanctuary of sanity to run to. We
must stop touting term limits and start making
government oversight a citizen participating endeavor
instead of a spectator sport!
An AmericanThinker.com commenter initials CEW
wrote on Feb. 18, 2010, “Reminds me of a number of
friends of mine who have said they have no interest in
politics. I would normally remind them that this is
foolish – since politics most certainly has an interest in
them.” Truer words have never been spoken in my
opinion. Thank you CEW.
Polling and the News
We now live in a world of continuous news and
continuous polling. This continuous polling is supposed
to help everyone understand what others think about an
issue but I think these polls are too numerous and in
many cases biased from the get go. Many are biased in
the questions they ask by loading the question. For
example: How bad do you think ____ is for America?
This type of question has built in a premise assuming
____ is bad and the pollster is just trying to see how bad
people think it really is. Then to make it worse, the poll
is done using only readers of a certain newspaper whose
reader base is already biased to the paper’s political
slant. So a slanted question is polled to a slanted base of
responders and the results are treated as kosher? If it
favors a politician’s cause it is used time and time again
and I never hear anyone mention a concern regarding the
accuracy of the poll, as long as the margin of error is
shown. This kind of poll looks credible and is used to
persuade the uninformed. The only way to fight this is to
become informed so when you see this kind of polling,
an automatic light goes off in your head making you
think who, what, and most important – why was this poll
done. Why was this poll done and who will benefit from
the conclusions it makes? Fact is, polls are done for a
reason and I think when the reason is to persuade instead
of inform we must be on the lookout. Lastly when a poll
is used as evidence against a politician’s cause, the
politician will usually just say they do not believe the
poll anyway.
News, does it exist anymore?
People report the news
with a bias based on their ideological beliefs. That is all
there is to it nowadays in my opinion. Tom Brokaw said
once that journalists will always be needed to interpret
information for the public. Inherent in his statement is an
elitist assumption of superiority and it should insult
anyone who hears it. It is a nice way to say you are too
stupid to understand the news on your own. The problem
is Tom, your interpretation if I wanted it from you would
be biased to your beliefs and ideology. There is no way
around it.
More journalists are simply liberal thinkers, artsy,
and creative right brained people. It is what they do. It is
what they are! Their talent is geared to story telling and I
think a lot of times reporting what happened gets mixed
up in a creative person’s need to tell a story and gain
recognition. People are going to write a story they find
interesting and a story they believe in. I don’t think they
will expend much time, energy, and creative talent trying
to make sure they show a side of a story which goes
against and diminishes their personal opinions. For
example, do you or I spend a lot of time doing things we
do not like to do? A logical conclusion would be a
journalist probably does not either, would it not? It
would be like trying to use your right hand to write if
you are a left handed person, no pun intended. You just
cannot do it. Well, very few can and I think this applies
to news and broadcast journalists as well. They simply
gravitate to other people and organizations who think
like they do.
I simply believe based on my experience with
understanding people that more right brain creative type
people go to journalism school and attend liberal arts
oriented universities. More left brain analytical, reason
focused people go into science, business, finance, etc.
Not all but most. So everyone talks about how the media
is biased and I think it is true but to understand why
might be just as important to understand.
These right brained creative people are not the kind
of people who are content or feel good about themselves
or their work if they were to only report the news.
Reporting to them would be simply listing or showing
the events which unfolded during the day and would be a
rather boring endeavor for creative minded people. I feel
today a journalist wants their work to be influential and
have tremendous meaning but if that journalist is biased
politically, to what cause will the story look to benefit?
If a story pushes right or left, democrat or republican,
liberal or conservative, is this really reporting the news
or just another interpretation of the news? Both sides of
the media are indeed guilty of this and I do not believe
there is any way around it save one.
Each individual person must have the ability to
decipher the news as reported to them and stop
complaining about the media bias because it will never
change or go away. It is not media bias; it is personal,
individual bias. They are who they are just like we are
who we are. To become an informed and educated
citizen, ready to defend the Constitution and the rights it
preserves, there is only one way. It is a long and
sometimes difficult process but a necessary one. The
difficult task is to learn the skill of reading and I am not
simply talking about the act of reading. I am talking
about reading with the ability to filter difficult and
sometimes confusing material. The material should be
American history, world history, biographies,
economics, capitalism, socialism, communism, fascism,
textbooks, business books, finance books, economics,
and politics of course. Anything and everything you can.
Reading this material gets easier over time and you will
start honing in on the subject which interests you most.
From there you will love reading because when you
finally get to a point where you realize how much
information there is out there, you will hunger for more.
The best thing I have ever learned is that I now know
how much I still do not know and it bothers me.
The key to being able to become your own filter for
what is put out as news daily is to become informed and
well read. The point to strive for when absorbing the
news today is to not only focus or concentrate merely on
what is being reported. You must also be consciously
aware of how the news is being reported. Once this skill
is attained, paying attention to what is going on in the
United States and in the world takes on a whole new
meaning.
If we turn our attention to discover what
exactly the journalist is trying to convince us into
believing, we can only then make our own conclusions.
This way we are not subject to the news event which
took place wrapped tightly in the journalists’
assumptions and opinion of how we should think about
it. When we have the skill and knowledge to make our
own individual conclusions, we will truly have
reinvigorated and are ready to carry on the American
spirit.
This U.S. Citizen
No comments:
Post a Comment