This morning's Dallas Morning News ran two pieces in the Viewpoints section that got me thinking. The first, by Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr,. I recognized as truth, in a head-shaking kind of way. The second, by Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, was unrelated but for subtle references to the plague of partisan posturing that is raging in our country.
You can read Pitts here. Highlights:
"... remember a time when facts settled arguments. This is back before everything became a partisan shouting match, back before it was permissible to ignore or deride as "biased" anything that didn't support your worldview.
If you and I had an argument and I produced facts from an authoritative source to back me up, you couldn't just blow that off. You might try to undermine my facts, might counter with facts of your own, but you couldn't just pretend my facts had no weight or meaning.
But that's the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by all the people who still don't believe the president was born in Hawaii or that the planet is warming."
And then he really warms up:
"To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper's online message board, is to realize that we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe."
Kind of harsh. But true, don't you think? And it's not just politicians.
1 comment:
I'm glad you're on my side.
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