We're at a crossroads

During the just concluded Republican National Convention, I decided to share a comment on Facebook to gauge the reaction of my friends and I was neither shocked nor surprised when I tallied the responses up. The statement simply said:

"I wonder why we are so obsessed with trying to find intelligent life on other planets when we can't even find intelligent life here?"

Forty people 'liked' my post and for those of you not familiar with Facebook, if you like somebody's post, Facebook lists your name so you'll know who weighed in. In checking the 40 likes, they were almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. I know this because it's practically impossible to be friends with someone and not be able to figure out their political affiliation, especially in today's political climate.

As you can see by the statement I shared on Facebook, it is non-partisan. And yet one thing became obvious as I looked at the likes. Democrats think that Republicans aren't intelligent and Republicans think the same thing about Democrats. A generation ago public political discourse was found everywhere and it was almost always civil. Regardless of your political affiliation, you cared most about what was good for the country and what could help the most in moving the country forward. The devil was usually in the details but it was not that hard to reach a consensus on broad solutions.

Today there is no consensus and very few civil conversations about politics and political actors. Some of the most egregious things ever are posted on Facebook about political parties in general and political actors in particular. These posts are made by adults and you have to wonder if this is how and what they teach their kids because many of the posts are offensive at best and potentially criminal at worst, depending on state and federal law+.

Is there a single factor that has contributed to this malaise more than anything else? I think there is. I believe it's the 24-hour-a-day, 7 days a week news cycle that has given birth to partisan political channels where the other side is never heard because it's never presented. I hear this argument made every day and have, in fact, made it to some of my friends. If you listened to any speech given at the Republican National Convention and then compared "analysis" of the speech from Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, you wouldn't and couldn't have believed it was the same speech.

In the previous generation I was referring to in one of the paragraphs above, national news broadcasts were fifteen minutes long and happened once a day. When I was a child, they were expanded to 30 minutes and I remember the hand wringing that went along with doubling the amount of news we were fed on a daily basis. The general feeling was the news organizations were going to have to present us with news stories that would have not met the muster when the news only lasted 15 minutes. But even at 30 minutes, the news was not seen to have an ideological bent. When Walter Cronkite reported on the CBS Evening News that the Vietnam War was lost and we needed to get out as soon as possible, he was not seen as a wild-eyed, knee-jerk liberal Democrat but as a thoughtful journalist who had weighed both sides of the situation and reached an objective decision.

That's almost impossible to do today with Fox News decidedly conservative and MSNBC News decidedly liberal. It's natural for people to want to be fed information that confirms their already held beliefs so you go to the source that does that. It doesn't matter to people that they're only getting one side of the story because the side they're getting is the side they like and favor. And in the process, they forget that they can't objectively make up their minds about anything when they're using only one perspective.

So we don't say you might be right or I might be wrong anymore. We stake out a territory we KNOW is right because Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or Chris Matthews or Rachel Maddow said it is and we steadfastly refuse to listen to the other side of the story.

That's why we're at a crossroads. If we stay on this course, things will continue to get more toxic between friends, neighbors and even relatives until one day the lid blows off and we have a third-world revolution right here in the least likely country in the world for that to have ever happened.