Letters From Home

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Don’t be part of the choir, no matter who’s preaching

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When you think about it, we learn least when we listen only to those we agree with. Isolating ourselves in such a comfortable, agreeable environment is natural–but if everyone’s in total agreement and nobody’s willing to start asking inconvenient questions, we isolate ourselves more and more from learning and from the expansion of human knowledge.

Begin paying real attention to the commentary of “the other side.” Don’t just dismiss them with the cuss word du jour and assume you’re not interested in hearing what they have to say. If you won’t go directly to the source, whatever information you might have will be secondhand at best, and filtered through someone else’s prejudices. Don’t you want to make up your mind for yourself? How are you going to do that if you won’t go straight to the source and get the facts for yourself?

I suppose it’s futile to say that one way to take a stand against ignorance is to quit listening to “commentators” in the first place. There’s not a one of them, no matter what they might say, who reports without bias. The whole point behind commentary is making pointed comments. And the commentators stay on the air because flocks of people who don’t know any better are sitting there listening and saying “Yeah!”

So, if you’re a fan of Keith Olbermann, give Bill O’Reilly honest equal time (and vice versa). If your favorite newspaper columnists are Rich Lowry, Mona Charen and Thomas Sowell, give equal reading time to Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd and Richard Cohen. You may well be astonished by what you learn. Years ago, I learned that particular lesson by reading Pat Buchanan’s commentary on the first Gulf War and finding out that he and I were in almost total agreement. If I’d refused to read “the other side,” quite a lesson would have been lost.

There’s a much wider world out there beyond our own little internal “villages” and if we refuse to explore it, we’re no better than ignorant villagers out to do the newcomers in with pitchforks and torches. Take a stand against ignorance–find out for yourself what the other guys are saying.

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Author: infmom

Otherwise known as Infamous Mom.

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