My last post addressed the issue of the need to be right as the one that might be at the heart of the growing division in our country…
Today’s post is about fessing up – finally, or the admirable trait of knowing when to admit wrongness.
Sometimes we are forced to do so. Like when the facts begin to reveal themselves…
Let’s take a quick inventory and based on that, make an assessment regarding timeliness…
Just this year we’ve seen the following evidence transpire…right before our very eyes…
Racism rearing its ugly head, openly and defiantly, in ways we haven’t seen in some time…with white men holding tiki torches marching to defend the statue of a man who led a rebellion against America, resulting in its bloodiest war, in order to defend the right to enslave humans…
and in the aftermath of the ensuing chaos, a President who saw “good people” on both sides of that issue…
Back to back…to back…category 5 hurricanes and catastrophic once in a thousand-year level flooding with widespread damage and resulting human misery…
A President who insults just about everyone, almost daily, with his twitter feed, in ways that would make Don Rickles blush…and in ways that threaten to ignite global nuclear conflict…
Another worst mass shooting in history by a fellow citizen with an arsenal of weapons that allowed him to mow down almost 60 people in less then 16 minutes…
And despite all that you have this entrenched ultra right-wing who just can’t bring themselves to admit a few things, such as…
That racism really is a pernicious problem in American culture…
That global warming is a real and increasing threat to our lives…
That our sitting President is more than a bit unhinged…
That banning assault weapons makes perfectly good sense, will save (and would’ve saved) many lives, and doing so does not negate the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution in any way.
The last post made what I believe to be the salient point that it’s the stories we tend to tell (and attach ourselves to) that give rise to this reluctance against fessing up…
It’s sort of like the scientific method. Now, I’m not a scientist, but I do know it works something like this…
One scientist proposes a theory. At this point it’s no more than an educated guess or hypothesis…in other worlds…a “story”…
That theory is put to the test. It is subject to ridicule and rejection by the rest of the scientific community.
If the theory is able to weather that storm it gets to become accepted truth…a scientific fact.
If not? Well then it’s swept into the dustheap of rejected scientific history.
I don’t mean to pick on the right-wing here…well, maybe I do…perhaps I should.
You see, it seems there are some stories that they’re clinging to that have now been shown to be just flat out wrong.
Many of their stories are failing the fact test.
However, it appears that rather than to be willing to let them go, as any good and honest scientist would in the face of overwhelming factual evidence, they just cling to them all the harder…
Now just imagine if scientists operated that way. Imagine the chaos it would cause in the world!
The very idea of scientific truth would cease to exist.
Every theory (or story) would hold claim to truth and its proponents would take the position that any factual evidence to the contrary is contrived.
I dare say that this breakdown in the scientific method would produce a world that you and I would not want to live in!
Where will this ultimately lead us?
Not sure about that one…I’m still holding out hope that these folks will come around…
I’ve still got faith that as the factual evidence grows to overwhelming proportions…as it surely is…
that fessing up – finally will appear to be their only option.
[…] I guess sometimes we’re able to forgive and make up. However, that requires one side to fess up and admit error. With respect to the current ideological division in the U.S., I don’t think […]