Truth Dances in the Middle
Today technology brings information to our eyes and ears all day long. We’re constantly asked to buy: dreams, objects, services, entertainment. And political argument.
In our country, the government once required that broadcasters using the “public airwaves” give equal time to both sides of a controversial subject. This “Fairness Doctrine” hewed to the centuriesold belief that balanced debate supports informed democracy. In 1987, under pressure from cable and satellite television stations, the doctrine was withdrawn.
Today a person with time and/or skills can speak, write or read whatever they like over the internet. Quilting enthusiasts can find each other. Angry people can find each other.
Cyberspace is the perfect venue for what my West Texas father called “popping off.” We all know someone who does that, don’t we? Someone who gets caught up in himself and says hurtful, damaging things he’d never voice otherwise.
Via social media and the internet’s dark side, people who revel in popping-off can nurture their mutual resentments. They can egg each other on, until one of them, or more, commits an act that destroys property and harms people.
What we need to understand, however, is that almost anyone is capable of this nastiness. All it takes is connection to enough people with similar beliefs and a couple of strong personalities who desire to channel the anger into a physical response. The “mob” effect is well known throughout history.
Some of the folks who were filmed at the Capitol on January 6 seemed almost like tourists, looking around vaguely at the statues and the imposing scale of the interior space. Maybe there would have been no violence if there hadn’t also existed an energizing core of motivators with malicious intent to draw the followers on.
The big, and peaceful, anti-war marches of the late 1960s and early 70s were organized carefully to avoid the emergence of such a cadre. The last thing any of the leaders wanted was for a mob to form. Mobs are dangerous. They aren’t reliable. They can’t be controlled with any certainty once they’re released from the pep talk.
Think of the pep rally in high school on the night before a big game. The intent is to fire up excitement to be expressed on the field that night, not to incite the kids to march on the opposing school that afternoon with clubs and torches.
It all comes down to the choice of words, doesn’t it? The words we hear in speeches and read in our news feeds. Repeated words and phrases that take on a life of their own. That feed on themselves.
Most of us don’t parse the sentences we hear or read. We don’t scrutinize. Who has time? We sift and select elements, according to our own beliefs, and those are the words we remember.
But there are people with political agendas—on all sides— who do parse every sentence uttered by the opposition. They’re looking for the words most likely to create a mistaken, but alarming, impression and they bundle those words into sound bites and headlines.
It is these mistaken impressions that most of us, reading our preferred news source, take as fact. And it is these intentionally mistaken impressions that have pitted us against one another.
Establishing trust between neighbors divided by politics will require balancing the news sources we draw on and guarding against exaggeration in our own speech, posts and tweets. It will require effort and the understanding that truth, ephemeral as it may seem, dances in the middle somewhere.
Like the truth of the blind men’s elephant, it is necessary to touch many parts of the animal before reality dawns.