It is what we say it is

I saw her scruffy, ill-tempered husband get into his battered, mud-splashed truck today and wondered what goes through her mind.

When I got home, I pulled this week's copy of Newsweek magazine out of the mailbox and the cover said, "THE MAKING OF A TERRORIST-CODDLING, WARMONGERING, WALL STREET-LOVING, SOCIALISTIC, GODLESS, MUSLIM PRESIDENT who isn't actually any of these things."

Then I go to class and interact with a student whose up-to-now narrow and restrictive interpretations of the world are being threatened by the sociological perspective.

These three incidents occurring on the same day served to reinforce what I've been experiencing for the past several years; many of us aren't concerned with the truth any more. We settle on a subjective reality that supports our biases, prejudices, and twisted definitions of the world we live in rather than the objective reality of facts.

That's why we still have people who believe that the earth is flat, that men never went to the moon, that the earth is the center of the universe, that Elvis is still alive and that Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and the Roswell aliens are real. And when they're presented with the truth, the facts, and the evidence to the contrary, they simply reject it because it doesn't fit their definition of the world.

As mentioned above, I've noticed this attitude in the classroom more and more over the past few years. Students come to college with a preconceived notion of the world rather than coming with an open mind. They come already knowing the truth, rather than seeking out the truth. They come set in their ways, rather than realizing there's probably a few things they don't know about the world they live in yet.

For many, the world has become what we think it is, rather than what it really is and I think that bodes bad for our future. If we reject any evidence that confronts or contradicts our definition of the world, then how do we continue to progress as a civilization?

Edward Kennedy, in his eulogy of Bobby Kennedy, quoted this statement made by his brother: "Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."

We progress as a society by saying why not, not by digging our heels in the ground while we desperately try to maintain the status quo and reject anything and everything that confronts our narrow definition of the world.

We should use the brief amount of time we have on this planet to explode circles, to go where man has not gone before, to seek out the truth regardless of where it takes us and to understand the truth whenever we're confronted with it.

To do anything else takes us in the wrong direction.