A Better America and a Challenge
As Americans, we believe in the possible. We have always felt that through hard work, strong principles, and empathy toward your fellow man (and woman), the years ahead and generations after us will be better. We have been better as a nation than we are today. Today is Inauguration Day. Regardless of your political affiliation, it should trouble us as Americans that Washington DC looks more today like Kabul, then that shining city on a hill Reagan spoke of.
2020 has been devastating on many, many levels…and 2021 has started pretty damn rocky. In the last year we faced a pandemic – 400,000 Americans dead – and a divisive election, made all the more so by network media and social media distorting facts, truth, and calling the other side enemy. Now, everyone with a navel can broadcast an opinion and claim “facts.” A whole segment of the population gets their news and “facts” through social media which, is to say, not news and not fact. The definition of a fact is actuality – the empirical truth about events as opposed to interpretation. All else is opinion.
Dwight D. Eisenhower said it best: “The clearest way to show what the rule of law means to us in everyday life is to recall what has happened when there is no rule of law.” So looking at what has transpired after the election and on January 6th, we need a restart. A reboot. How? A simple two-prong suggestion: 1) Delete all social media that isn’t traveling, dogs (and maybe cats and horses, yes, definitely horses), recipes, books, family, and fun; and 2) Because there is no such thing as true journalism these days, limit news to 30 minutes a day and force yourself to read or watch a mixture of news channels, some you ordinarily would not endorse because it doesn’t enforce your own beliefs. In other words, stop listening to the echoes and start listening to one another. You will not agree with the other, but you may learn to understand the other and perhaps, just maybe, meet the other part of the way.
If you reject compromise, if you only believe in the dogma of the left or the right, a better America will elude us. In the meantime, stay safe, hang in there, and breathe deep. To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, when you reach the end of the rope, hang on.