The Way I See It

I have to laugh or cry in today’s world of information. I never was so involved with my own political side until my disability forced me into early retirement eight years ago. Watching a lot of television, reading a lot of books and articles and engaging in social media taught me more about the state of our world than I ever really wanted to know.

Through all of it the free exchange of ideas seems to have turned into a domestic battle field of who is right and who is wrong. True objectivity has vanished from existence. It occurred to me today that everyone journalists, commentators, reporters, producers, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. every single person expresses their facts, thoughts, ideas, opinions, conversations, et al, with one single foundational beginning….experience. Myself included. The way we think, the way we write, the way we study, the way we research, the way we hold a simple conversation all of it comes from what we were taught to do from what we were exposed to in life. That is experience.

Therefore, what we think about the political climate today is greatly influenced by our experiences. It is difficult to be objective in the face of adversity to our own thought process. We all want to convince the other person that they are wrong and we are right.  How truly unfair that is in terms of human nature. Most professionals, in particular teachers and journalists believe facts are facts.  How they arrive at that conclusion is by being influenced by their own experiences to take a cited article or author at absolute faith.  To be convinced it is actual reality because it is backed by statistics and formal data.  It gets pushed under the rug when those very same facts that were taught for generations as truths are all of a sudden disproven because some other entity has decided that all the facts that were known to be true when taught were all conspiracy theories to brainwash all children to believe in them. I ask you does that make any more sense than the idea that we now must believe in the “new” facts because someone changed the “old” ones based on their experiences when they did the same research that was previously done?  All of a sudden did new information come to light?  If it did it was based on the experience of the current person or people now presenting the “new” facts.  How you might ask does a fact now change because someone said it is now a different fact? The way people interpret those very facts are the way they will be presented to the world. So in logic are they actually “facts” because someone wrote them down eons ago? Or are they “facts interpreted by people with experiences that influenced their rational for labeling them facts?

Yes, I know deep thought stuff. However deep thought seems to be the only tool left to us that can form any type of common sense out into the open. To base our facts upon theory or hypothetical illusions is nonsense. To take to heart every fact that ever was and yet has been changed through the ages is also nonsense. However, gathering whatever information is out there deciphering it, dissecting it and filtering it through our common sense and experiences is where we will find our truths to live by. Where our own innate understanding will rise to our intellectual capability and allow us to follow a path that in the end will be our “facts”, tempered by our instincts, and emboldened by our experiences, only then will we believe half of what we read and all of what we see. Only then will facts actually become facts because we will have lived them.

And that is how I See It here in Jackson!

K