This Little Light

Normally I don’t use this forum to comment on political events. Doing so would necessitate actual research on my part, and it’s really much easier to write a dozen or so paragraphs about pop culture or something even more depressing, like my parenting skills. Recent events, however, have convinced me to take a closer look at some particularly unfortunate beltway melodrama: namely, the Shirley Sherrod incident.

Mrs. Sherrod, as I’m sure many of you know, was asked to resign from her position as Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA a few weeks ago due to a now infamous clip of her speaking at a NAACP meeting this past March. Taken out of context, the clip suggests that Mrs. Sherrod is a racist and used her influence to do racist things. For a short while, much of the media demonized her while the White House and the Department of Agriculture called for her head. Shirley Sherrod was a momentary pariah; a vile symbol of “reverse” racism.

Once given the opportunity to explain, however, it quickly became evident that a giant mistake had been made. The speech in its entirety actually portrayed Mrs. Sherrod using her own intellectual journey, one that many Americans have made throughout their lifetime, to make a broader point about the potential for racial harmony. Seen from this light, the Obama Administration and nearly everyone else really had no choice but to offer her a big apology, along with another job.

Whoops.

Now, I find a number of elements about this story curious, but the most damning, by far, is that a large number of people who should have known better simply took for granted that what they saw on the Internet was true.

The Internet.

The Internet is not new. It’s been around awhile, and making important decisions because of what you see on You-Tube or read from someone’s blog is like choosing your prom date based on the detailed information you read on the wall of a public restroom.

Anyone can make a blog. I have a blog. You’re reading it right now, and if you have half a brain, you will not order off a Chinese menu much less fire someone based on what you see or read from this website. Technology exists that allows a dirty-minded twelve-year-old to make it look like a squirrel is making love to an ostrich.

And I think that merits repeating. With very little effort, a person can make it look like a small, woodland mammal is making love to the world’s largest bird.

And yet someone lost their job because of similar technology.

The Internet.

Each Spring I try to teach my 7th graders how to write a research paper, and one of the first things I tell them is that just because it’s on the Internet does not mean it’s true. Clearly there are millions of reputable websites out there full of well written, thoroughly researched, fact-based articles. And then there’s this blog, for example, or any other homemade, nut-job, agenda-driven tirade pretending to be an actual news source capable of, somehow, convincing our government to fire a lady for using her own life journey to make a larger point.

This is not to say that just because someone has an obvious political agenda they’re amoral liars. But it does make them suspect as credible sources of authentic information. It does mean we should read their words warily. It does mean we should examine what they have to say with a grain of salt.

Too often what passes for political discourse in this country are simply liberal media outlets reinforcing liberal ideas, conservative media outlets reinforcing conservative ideas, while the audiences of each merely scream at each other while patting themselves on the back.

That’s not how things get done in a democracy, particularly one as old and as complicated as our own. The very nature of our federal system is based on the art of compromise. There’s a reason why we have both a Senate and a House of Representatives, and it’s not so we can be inundated with political commercials every other year.

It seems to me that there was a time in our history when a set of divergent political arguments could be heated, hammered and forged into something new; an alloy that left no one entirely satisfied but at least kept the peace, and, more often than not, ended up benefiting a large number of people anyway.

I fear that time has passed.

Our White House has called this most recent embarrassment “a teachable moment.” This much is true, and, if I may be so bold, here are a few lessons we might learn from all this nonsense.

Read between the lines before you rush to judgment. Read, period. If you watch a lot of MSNBC, spend a couple evenings with Fox News. If you’re a Sean Hannity fan, give Keith Olbermann a try. If you read the New York Times, listen to Rush Limbaugh for awhile, and vice versa.

And, if you’re like me and you get your news from Jon Stewart, it’s probably time to pick up an actual newspaper.

The point is, seriously listening to and considering an opponent’s argument doesn’t mean you’re “betraying the cause” or that you’ll somehow wake up with an entirely new political schema. If anything, especially if your own opinions are logically constructed, it should help you strengthen your own arguments. At the same time, you’ll also have a better idea of how the other side thinks, which can only help everyone in the long run.

Calling each other names won’t revive the economy. Blaming each other isn’t going to stop any terrorists. Misrepresenting your opponent and then rushing to judge in order to score political points is not patriotic.

It’s stupid.

It’s distracting, and it keeps us from focusing on the things upon which we do agree. It paralyzes us from taking action to fix the problems we all agree need fixed.

The truly great civilizations were never really destroyed by external enemies. They were weakened from within, sometimes over the course of centuries, sometimes over the course of decades. They were weakened by immoral behavior, by corrupt officials, by generalized apathy and basic ignorance.

There will always be barbarians at the gate.

And right now they’re having a great time listening to us argue.