When Resistance is Blind

I recently discovered a new word and fell a little in love. It’s actually an old word, a slang term from the Victorian era. (The Victorians had slang! Who knew?) The word is “podsnappery,” which to this poet’s ear is delightfully melodic and crispy at the same time. Borrowed from the name of a character in Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend, the word has been defined in part as “a refusal to recognize unpleasant facts.” Mr. Podsnap, as a member of the elite privileged class in mid-19th century England, was not one to brood about economic disparities or the plight of the less fortunate. When it came to the problems of the world, his motto was “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!”

I don’t think many people today can be accused of podsnappery in the classic sense. There are many facts (poverty, prejudice, violence, disease, environmental destruction, the incivility of American political discourse, etc.) that are considered unpleasant and yet still admitted to and discussed by the masses. On the whole, we are not living in an age of rose-colored glasses.

Yet podsnappery can be seen as one type of response to an experience known today as cognitive dissonance. Originating in the field of psychology and steadily gaining ground in debates about all kinds of issues, cognitive dissonance is defined in part as “the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information.” Mr. Podsnap keeps this unpleasant experience at bay by simply putting the smack-down on any piece of information that threatens his cozy, insular view of the world and his deserved place in it. But other typical responses to cognitive dissonance are a little more nuanced.

Often, people confronted with contradictory information will try to explain it away with reasoning that supports their views, or else seek to discredit the source. They may seek support from like-minded others who share their beliefs, in order to reassure themselves that the information is false or faulty. But some will feel so threatened that they will attack the messenger, and/or actively work to convince other people that it’s untrue.

There are other, arguably more constructive responses to cognitive dissonance. Some people will conclude that they simply don’t know enough about the overall picture to resolve the mental conflict rationally. Or, in perhaps the most rare cases, people might let go of their assumptions or even change their existing beliefs based on the new information. But by and large, cognitive dissonance is met with far more instinctive reaction than conscious intention.

The consequences of resisting cognitive dissonance can be seen throughout history. Take Galileo — his observations supporting the heliocentric view of the cosmos presented a big fat threat to the existing assumptions and beliefs of his time, and a threat to the Catholic Church in particular. Inquisitions, trials, forced retractions and house arrest were Galileo’s rewards for pursuing and promoting the unfathomable concept that the Earth revolves around the sun. The resulting ban on heliocentric literature throughout the Holy Roman Empire was just one of countless events in our time-honored tradition of banning and burning books, scholars, and free-thinkers over the millennia.

I’ve always found it interesting that “heresy” — a crime punishable by death during much of the era of Church rule — was basically what got Jesus in trouble with the law in the first place. You’d think his followers in later centuries would have been more forgiving. But I digress.

Modern discoveries in space can also cause backlash when they strike at the core of people’s beliefs and assumptions. Remember when Pluto got demoted? In 2006, discoveries from the space probe New Horizons led the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to change Pluto’s status from planet to dwarf planet, and it did not go over well. Resistance came from astronomers and lay people alike, and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was personally blamed for the decision in a flurry of hate mail, much of it from children. Even the scientists on the New Horizons mission were “devastated” by the reclassification, and principal investigator Alan Stern has called for reinstating Pluto’s rightful planethood, insisting that the IAU’s definition of “planet” is flawed.

It seems that even when it comes to science, our preference for our existing beliefs prevails. Yet beliefs and assumptions about objective facts are one thing. For the most part, we come around (if sometimes reluctantly) when respected scientists announce new discoveries that shift an existing paradigm. It’s when we get into the territory of ideals and values that the claws really come out.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…

Much has been said over the past few years about cognitive dissonance in political debate, with conservatives and liberals regularly accusing each other of ignoring conflicting information when arguing for their views. In conversations about how we should be treating the planet, people on the right seem to ignore the threats posed by our continued dependence on fossil fuels in a manner reminiscent of Cornelius Fudge’s response to the return of Voldemort. Meanwhile, the left seems maddeningly out of touch with the very real needs of people whose livelihoods depend on the fossil fuel industry — needs like food and shelter — and who therefore feel threatened by environmentalist policies. To them, these liberal urbanites with their hybrid cars and online jobs might even come across as podsnappers.

There are solid points to be made from each of these perspectives, but the willingness to hear out a contradictory argument seems rare these days, judging from the airwaves and the poo-flinging atmosphere of the social media jungle. Over and over, I see people refute, deflect, ignore, team up, attack — anything it takes to keep their personal worldviews upright and stable. We have memes and insults to toss back and forth at each other, with varying degrees of factual supporting evidence, but we rarely make an effort to step back and listen to opinions — even when they’re rooted in facts — that don’t match our own.

As a result, progress remains out of reach, while the problems we argue about, like environmental destruction and economic insecurity, persist and grow worse. It’s as if we’d rather stay permanently stuck in our predicaments, each of us living in fear for our well-being, than to find workable solutions through compromise. But why?

Why do well-meaning and reasonably-informed people from every point on the political spectrum resist information that would force them to honestly reexamine their stances on any given issue? Having given this a lot of thought over the past two years, both on a personal level and with an eye toward the bigger picture, I humbly offer a few possible reasons:

1: Because we don’t want to be wrong.

I mean, come on — it’s embarrassing.

Unless we’re playing trivia or charades, when the risk of being wrong is part of the fun, we instinctively seek to avoid it, whether we’re in conversation or just silently protecting a privately held assumption. Sure, there are some enlightened souls who are good at releasing their egoic attachment to being right, but I think it’s fair to say that most of us truly want to avoid looking or feeling stupid. Often, our years of formal education have taught us that the correct answer is the path to approval, and that being wrong is grounds for shame. So when we come across information that contradicts what we think we know, our first subconscious impulse is to resist it.

2: Because it hurts.

When I hear or read something I vehemently disagree with, especially if the topic is one I have an emotional connection to, I can actually feel a sort of angsty turbulence in my gut. It’s usually subtle, but it’s icky, and I want it to go away immediately. So I automatically reject the source of the turbulence, without trying to examine it from a place of logic or neutrality. Judging from the raging battles I see so often on Facebook these days, a whole lot of otherwise-reasonable people have the same response.

While researching for this article I came across a writer who put it this way:

“Cognitive dissonance is like an emergency in the human mind. You cannot withstand it at all.”

This was from a “pro-gun” website, and I had to wrestle with a good deal of cognitive dissonance just to get to the end of the piece, but to me that quote is a gem, regardless of where it came from. (Though I wonder how many people who know me personally are having an emergency in the mind because I just quoted a “pro-gun” writer in a non-negative context.)

No one wants an emergency in their mind. It’s an icky flinch, uncomfortable at best, and depending on the circumstances, potentially very, very painful. You cannot withstand it, and so it requires a response, which usually falls into either the “fight” or “flight” category. It’s an act of self-preservation, and I think ultimately it comes from a place of fear. Because, well….

3: Because it’s scary.

There’s a lot of fear around the notion that something we don’t want to believe could really be true. For starters, there’s the fear of being wrong (see #1) and the fear of having an emergency in the mind (see #2). But there are even deeper implications for considering contradictory information. It might mean, for example, that what we’ve learned so far in life is insufficient, faulty, or of little value. It might mean we’ve been lied to — by our teachers, our bosses, our media, our leaders, our cultural heroes. It might even lead us to wonder if we should start questioning everything we know.

And dammit, we’ve gone to a lot of trouble to learn what we know. At least 12 years of school, if not more, and then years and years — decades — of life experience thrown on top. The idea that what we’ve been taught could be based on insufficient or faulty premises feels like a betrayal. Even many of us who understand that the history we learned in school was sanitized and incomplete still want to have faith in the institutions that deliberately left critical information out. After all, those institutions helped shape us into who we are.

We’re invested in what we know because it informs our beliefs, which in turn inform our sense of identity. As rocket scientist and law professor Ozan Varol puts it:

“When your beliefs are entwined with your identity, changing your mind means changing your identity. That’s a really hard sell.”

Where I grew up in Northern Michigan, hunting is part of the cultural fabric, so much so that high school students with a hunting license could get a 3-day pass to miss school during deer season. As a vegetarian and animal rights supporter who was not granted any time off to go snowboarding, I was incensed by this policy, and by hunting in general. Since it was no longer necessary to eat deer for survival, I saw no reason for anyone to kill any of these gentle, graceful creatures. Ever.

I held this view for the next decade, until I read Barbara Kingsolver’s excellent novel Prodigal Summer, which laid out the problems of our modern ecosystems in a way I had never been able to understand before. Set in Appalachian Kentucky, the story incorporates scientific research to illustrate how the overabundance of deer in many parts of the U.S. — created in part due to our near-extermination of their natural predators — has wreaked havoc on entire ecosystems, leading to the extinction of native plant species, the thriving of invasive species, and ultimately the deterioration of habitat for the deer themselves. Added to these issues are the number of serious car accidents and substantial crop losses in areas heavily populated by deer, which are not small inconveniences for the communities affected by them.

Animal rights groups often argue that hunting is not only cruel, but also ineffective as a means of managing deer populations, which they believe should be allowed to “regulate naturally.” Many also believe that it’s humans who are overpopulated, as we continue to destroy more and more wildlife habitat. I happen to agree on this point, but it’s a philosophy, not a strategy, and it offers no solutions to the ecological problems we face today.

Having looked into both sides of the debate, I find that while animal rights advocates say many things that my heart agrees with, it’s the hunters who seem to be able to back up their arguments with data. At least in the case of deer in Michigan, there are more reasons to support hunting than to oppose it. A detailed report on the state’s deer management plan from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources shows a careful, attentive approach that tries to incorporate the concerns of all Michigan residents, as well as the welfare of its wildlife, when shaping hunting policies. It also points out the importance of hunting to Michigan’s economy as well as to wildlife conservation, which is largely funded with license fees paid by hunters and fishers. In other words, the practice of hunting in my home state’s beautiful natural lands is helping to keep those lands beautiful and natural.

I can still remember realizing, and then having to accept, that my resentment toward my neon-orange-and-camo-wearing classmates had been uninformed and misguided. It officially no longer made sense to oppose hunting in all forms across the board (though my objection to the lack of attendance-policy parity for snowboarders still stands). I didn’t stop being a vegetarian or caring about animal welfare, but I did become someone with a deeper understanding and a more nuanced view of the issue — which, to be honest, felt weird and uncomfortable. Though I will always adore Kingsolver’s book, I really didn’t like having to open up and accommodate this new information.

But I was only in my mid-twenties then, and I think we tend to be more pliable, ideologically speaking, in our earlier years. The “flip-flop” on the deer question wasn’t really all that hard to come to terms with, once I had learned enough to see a bigger picture. It was as I grew older — and I suspect this is also true for most people — that I began to get too comfortable in my belief system to be able to integrate any new information that challenged it.

I believed, for example, that despite the disaster that had been the George W. Bush years, and the obvious political corruption going on in D.C., it was still possible to vote someone into office who would work for the best interests of the people. I was passionate about Barack Obama’s candidacy and absolutely euphoric over his win in 2008. I believed we were turning a new page. I believed what he said on the campaign trail — his commitment to government transparency, his advocacy for peace and economic justice — and I believed he would walk his talk. He had to! How else would we ever turn things around? Why else had we been spared from another 4 years of a Republican presidency?

So when it turned out that the banks responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 essentially skated with a slap on the wrist, I believed the people who said there was really nothing the administration could do. When I learned, in 2011, that the U.S.had been bombing 4 different countries in Africa and the Middle East (which was not publicly admitted until 2013 and eventually grew to 7 countries), I believed the arguments for targeted, “precision” assaults as the best option for fighting terrorism with minimal casualties. As for the well-founded declaration that Obama’s administration was the least transparent in history, with a penchant for retaliation against whistleblowers, well, that one I couldn’t really reconcile. So I ignored it.

My faith in Obama did wane gradually over his two terms, and my vote for him in 2012 was far less enthusiastic than the first one. But it wasn’t until he turned his back on the Sioux water protectors at Standing Rock, who in late 2016 were shot with tear gas, rubber bullets, and water cannons (in sub-freezing temperatures) for trying to save their land and their water supply from likely contamination via the Dakota Access Pipeline, that any attachment I had left to those old beliefs about Obama was finally obliterated. The president who had promised to protect the environment and improve relationships with sovereign Native American nations was virtually silent when Big Oil’s private security mercenaries attacked peaceful Native protestors on their own tribal lands.

It took 8 years of consistent disappointment topped by this heartbreaking final blow for me to fully accept that the man I voted for was not who I thought he was. All along the way, I fought this unsettling notion because 1) I didn’t want to be wrong, 2) I didn’t want to feel the pain of betrayal that acknowledging it would bring, and 3) I was afraid that if I faced up to it, I’d permanently lose hope for our political system, the nation itself, and the world. (Happily, it turns out that I don’t need to hang my hopes on any political leader in order to feel optimism, but that’s another topic for another time.)

But not all resistance is quite so rooted in ego, ideology, or survival instinct. Often enough, it’s just a practical solution to living in the Information Age. Which brings me to my final reason:

4: Because we seriously do not have room in our brains for this right now.

It’s a popular myth that smartphones and other modern technology have shortened the human attention span to less than that of a goldfish. While it turns out that there’s no reliable, standardized method for measuring the attention span of people or fish, there is a significant side effect of our reliance on technology that so many of us experience on a regular basis: information overload.

An explosion of online news sources and social media sharing has amplified both the desire and the perceived pressure to “stay informed,” but over-consumption of news and news-related debates has real consequences for both our physical and mental health. At some point, we have to set boundaries and limit our exposure to information. Why not start by weeding out what we don’t even want to know in the first place?

If I’ve only got so much time and energy for scrolling through my Facebook or Twitter feed, then I’m probably not going to be broadening my horizons about every single thing that people are pestering me to pay attention to, no matter how worthy of attention they may be. There are just some topics that will have to fall by the wayside, and they are likely to be the ones I least want to think about. After all, I’m not hanging out on social media to make myself miserable (even if sometimes that’s exactly what happens).

Then there’s the issue of “fake news,” which has become a catch-all term for various sources of information: blatantly false stories, partially true but unclearly explained or intentionally slanted stories, true but very badly written stories, and true stories that people don’t want to be true. The proliferation of media, both mainstream and independent, that runs the gamut in terms of journalistic quality has raised the stakes for critical discernment — more is asked from us in this department than ever before. So since we already can’t pay attention to everything we come across, we tend to stick with a handful of news sources we trust. We assume that we’re getting all the details necessary to form a complete picture. If there’s something our sources don’t cover, we tell ourselves it probably isn’t significant anyway.

We really do need to have information filters in place, or we’ll be bombarded and unable to function in the world. Rejecting the experience of cognitive dissonance is one way to filter and organize the immense amount of data we take in on a daily basis. It also helps us avoid thinking about how much we really don’t know about the world and how it works. Because if you can really stop and try to imagine the vastness of all that you do not know, it feels a little like standing at the edge of a cliff in a blinding fog. It’s dizzying, it feels risky, and seriously, who has room in their brain for an experience like that?

The Perils of Ignorance

I would bet that every one of us has had all of these reactions to cognitive dissonance. But here’s the thing: resistance doesn’t solve problems. As long as we think we know all we need to know about an issue, and refuse to accept new information that doesn’t confirm our existing beliefs, we just keep digging in our heels against those we disagree with. This leads to zero progress, because we cannot change what we don’t understand.

Critical thinking requires a willingness to examine our own knowledge, our preconceived notions, and the innate, unconscious prejudices that are simply by-products of our individual life experiences. It requires a willingness to hear and consider opposing perspectives, born themselves out of innate, unconscious prejudices. This is a hard place to get to, especially in these times of extreme polarization and fierce emotional intensity. Perhaps an easier approach is to simply face that cliff edge, and begin to identify the questions we don’t have answers to.

Let me give you an example of what I mean:

Executive Order 13818

I don’t remember how I first learned of child trafficking in the U.S. I understood that children went missing, having grown up reading about them on milk cartons as their faces haunted my breakfast. But I always thought the kidnappers were lone psychopaths with no connections to the civilized world. When I began to realize that there were organized networks of psychopaths trafficking children right under the nose of the civilized world, I basically pulled a podsnap and blocked the information from my mind. For years, I continued to shut it out every time it crept up to the edges of my awareness. I just couldn’t go there.

I wanted to believe it was a tragic but rare problem on the fringes of American society, because I didn’t want to believe that humanity’s capacity for evil could really run this deep, on such a pervasive level. But it does, as I began to learn in earnest almost two years ago. And learning about it — its breadth, the extent of its cruelty, and the way its tentacles extend into all facets of society — has contributed to a massive paradigm shift in the way I view the political landscape and the world at large.

I’ve learned that children are bought and sold for forced labor, domestic servitude, and sex (i.e. rape) at an alarmingly growing rate, as part of a 150 billion dollar worldwide human trafficking industry. This happens in every state in America, and in at least 126 other countries around the world. In 2008, it was estimated that more than 2 million children per year are sexually exploited in the commercial sex industry worldwide, a number that has almost certainly risen over the past decade.

Then there are the child soldiers — in at least 14 countries, children as young as 10 are recruited, often forcibly, into fighting wars. Children (and adults) are also killed for their organs, often as a result of being trapped in or fleeing these same wars.

The intractability of child trafficking is evidenced by the dismal number of prosecutions of human traffickers: just under 15,000 globally in 2016, with only 439 convictions in the U.S. The reasons for these numbers are many and vary from country to country, but here at home, a justice system that has traditionally blamed the victims of underage sex trafficking has certainly not helped.

The picture is indeed bleak, but awareness of the issue seems to be on the rise, along with citizen-led initiatives like Traffickcam, an app that helps law enforcement locate trafficked children through pictures of hotel rooms, and Airline Ambassadors, a program that trains flight attendants to recognize victims of trafficking on commercial flights and intervene on their behalf.
But an abomination this deeply entrenched in our society requires action that will strike from the top down, as well as the bottom up. So it was with interest that I read about an action taken by the White House shortly before last Christmas.

On December 21, 2017, the president issued “Executive Order Blocking the Property of Persons Involved in Serious Human Rights Abuse or Corruption” (EO 13818). Drawing on several pieces of prior legislation, including the Global Maginsky Act of 2016, Trump essentially declared that the current global scale of human rights abuse (along with corruption, without which child trafficking can’t exist) constitutes an “unusual and extraordinary” national emergency. This designation paves the way for the U.S. government to legally freeze all U.S.-held assets of “any foreign person determined…to be responsible for or complicit in, or to have directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human rights abuse.” These assets include bank accounts and all other financial resources, as well as material goods and the means of transporting goods to and from the U.S.

So, while the targets of this order are not Americans, the implementation will necessarily affect American banks, companies, and citizens who hold or control any property belonging to the identified individuals. As a starting point, EO 13818 specifically names 13 individuals and 39 affiliated people and entities, with broad leeway for designating more in the future.

Human rights activists have praised the order. Rob Berschinski of Human Rights First described it as “an extremely flexible human rights and anti-corruption accountability tool with global reach….It’s a big deal. In a good way.” Conchita Sarnoff of the Alliance to Rescue Victims of Trafficking argued that it’s the most “significant piece of legislation protecting children’s rights and imposing financial damages on human rights abusers” since 2000.

In fact, this is exactly the kind of action called for in January 2017 by international human rights and national security writer Olivia Enos, who explained:

[d]ue to its dominance in the global financial system, the U.S. Treasury Department’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing tools can threaten trafficker’s profits. Treasury has the ability to identify funding sources for human trafficking, track perpetrators, rescue victims, and address the primary motive driving human trafficking: profit. Freezing trafficker’s assets not only threatens their bottom line, it can illuminate networks of organized criminals or terrorists. Additionally, coordination between Treasury and local law enforcement could result in the rescue of more victims.

This last quote is what really made the EO click for me. Even as I was learning more about the scope of child trafficking in the U.S., I had never actually thought to wonder how it’s carried out on a daily basis. Where do these targeted funds and other assets come from? How, more specifically, can these networks be “illuminated” by the tracking of these funds? Are the affected financial institutions complicit in any way, or have they been duped by sly, well-educated and well-financed criminals? Who are the perpetrators of human trafficking, and where do they live? How do they conduct their day-to-day atrocities? Where are the children?

What other businesses might be revealed by a dismantling of these networks? Hotels, restaurants, transportation providers? We know that trafficking takes place every day in plain sight, so we also know these aren’t lone psychopaths or small, separate groups. In a $150 billion industry, it seems impossible that these people aren’t being assisted in an organized way to carry out their crimes on such a scale.

So who is assisting? Are there people being paid to look the other way? How many? Who is at the top of the chain of command of any given network? And how, precisely, is human trafficking intertwined with the atrocious and complex crisis at our southern border? What role might our own government have played, or still be playing?

In an age where unbiased news is almost non-existent, and investigative journalism has given way to shallow, endlessly recycled coverage of the story du jour, it’s very hard to find thorough, well-sourced answers to these and so many other questions. To put it mildly, context is not mainstream media’s strong suit. But what is the price of resigning ourselves to settling for what they offer? How does what we don’t know hurt us? How does our ignorance perpetuate the hurting of millions of children?

Of Dictators and Shadows

As I was wrapping up this already-long piece, another development occurred that demanded to be included. On June 12, after a tumultuous year of insults and frightening brinkmanship between Trump and Kim Jong Un over nuclear weapons, the first meeting between a U.S. president and a North Korean head of state took place in Singapore.

The two leaders met for over 3 hours, each accompanied by their senior aides, after meeting privately for 40 minutes with only their interpreters present — no note takers or other witnesses were in the room. They emerged from the summit with an agreement focused on the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, which has so far yielded one tangible result: the supension of the recurring “war games” conducted by the U.S. and South Korea, which have exacerbated tensions on the peninsula since the 1950s.

Wait…what?

Did you see this coming? Because I didn’t see this coming.

Somewhat predictably, many in the liberal media as well as many congressional Democrats quickly brushed past the historic significance of the meeting and dismissed the results as merely more empty promises from an insane and untrustworthy rogue nation. It was almost as if everyone had made up their minds about it before it even happened.

And why not be skeptical? For our entire lives, we have been told that North Korea is a dangerous and likely permanent enemy; for years our best hopes have been merely to keep them from starting a nuclear war. Skepticism in this case is certainly warranted. But beyond the surface-level images and short, generalized write-ups we see in the media, what can we honestly say we know about the seven-decade stalemate dividing this peninsula, and our own government’s role in it? What context might we be missing?

I’m curious, for example, about why the talks went so well that Trump left Singapore hours ahead of schedule. And how did Trump, of all people, pull this off in the first place — especially after that bizarre flare-up between the two governments in late May that led to the summit being cancelled?

Also, what’s with Kim Jong Un going on a sightseeing tour of Singapore on the eve of the summit, in full view of the whole world, breaking the usual secrecy and reclusiveness that both he and his father, Kim Jong-il, are so well known for? (And while we’re at it, what was up with all those trips Dennis Rodman took to North Korea? “Basketball diplomacy” with the Supreme Leader?)

Who is this guy, anyway?

I did some research to expand my understanding of U.S.-North Korean relations, as well as of Kim himself. What I come away with are questions about the life experiences of a man who was raised by a family of dictators, and inherited the control of his country before his 30th birthday. Who was born more than 30 years after the end of the Korean War, during which the U.S. had essentially obliterated his country, dropping over 420,000 bombs on Pyongyang (a city of 400,000 people) alone.

I have questions about what he was taught about America and the rest of the world. And questions about who else was involved in the assassinations and human rights abuses that all three Kim regimes have perpetrated. Because although we’ve been taught to view whichever Kim is in charge as the figurehead of this highly problematic government, we know that none of these men worked alone. So who are the other players here? What agendas have been in place until now, and what may have changed?

Why this move toward reconciliation with both the U.S. and South Korea after just 7 years in power, when his father and grandfather held fast to policies of isolation and antagonism for more than half a century? And what are the implications of this shift in international relations for the North Korean people — their living conditions, their human rights?

Finally, the question that intrigues me most: what did Kim and Trump talk about during those 40 minutes alone?

There’s just so much we don’t know — about reality on the ground in North Korea, or in Asia generally, or in Africa, or in the Middle East. Or in America, for that matter.

I mean, what really goes on in the White House, in any administration, on any given day? What are people saying to each other behind closed doors? Who are these people we see only on the television, in the papers? What’s it really like in the halls of Congress? What are the hidden agendas, and those not-quite-hidden, of the power players in D.C.? Did seven years of The West Wing give us even a smidgen of accurate information about how these things work, or was every minute of it pure fairy tale?

All I know for sure is that there’s a big picture — a really, really big picture — that no single one of us can fathom on our own. It expands infinitely beyond the screens of our televisions, laptops — all the places we go to gather information. We sift and sort through the news, editorials, memes, arguments, holding up facts and opinions to see how well they fit with our existing beliefs. In rejecting what doesn’t fit, we have gradually narrowed our focus to very specific angles on each issue, avoiding the dizzying vastness of all that we don’t know, wrapping ourselves in our preferences for what to believe, what to fear, what to rage against, and who to blame.

I think it’s time we step back and open up to a wider view. To relax our grip on what we think we know, and cultivate some objectivity. To educate ourselves and each other, so that we might bring some clarity to the chaos. To come to understand our problems well enough to find workable solutions. I think it’s time to come together and share our pieces of the picture. And to consider the pieces that others bring — with less blind resistance, and more willingness to see.