The State of Our Community

We shall begin with the elephant: we and our children have grown up in a world increasingly dominated by images rather than written words. In the process, our ability—and perhaps more importantly, our willingness—to use rhetoric, critical thinking, and analysis to dismantle claims and determine whether they are actually true has begun to atrophy. We no longer demand carefully reasoned arguments we can examine line by line. Instead, we increasingly rely on images, music, personalities, and the feelings they produce to form our judgments. News programs, podcasts, videos, and social media influence not only what we think about, but how we feel about it, often in ways we scarcely recognize. Perhaps most troubling, disagreement itself has become difficult. Rather than treating debate as a way to test our ideas and discover where we might be wrong, we increasingly experience disagreement as a personal challenge. The result is not deeper thought, but anger, defensiveness, and division.

At first glance, you might think I’m being hyperbolic in suggesting that images alone can have this kind of effect. After all, how could watching something on television or listening to a podcast actually interfere with your ability to think rationally? To answer that, consider how information is presented to us. News programs reduce complex events to segments lasting only a few minutes, packaged with dramatic music, carefully chosen colors and backgrounds, polished graphics, and attractive, authoritative-looking hosts—all designed to capture your attention and encourage your trust. Before you have much time to question or seriously consider what you have just heard, an advertisement interrupts. Then the program returns, the subject changes, and the conversation moves on.

What you are consuming is not simply information; it is information packaged as entertainment. Much of it concerns events with little or no connection to your daily life: murders, scandals, deception, corruption, and political controversies occurring in other cities, states, and countries. Yet these distant events are continually brought into your home and presented as matters demanding your immediate attention and emotional response. And if you miss one of these segments, you’re unlikely to escape it entirely. Friends, family members, coworkers, and social media will quickly fill the gap—usually by supplying not the facts themselves, but their emotional reaction to them.

Everyone now seems ready to offer an opinion on almost any subject, yet remarkably few people will spend even thirty seconds checking whether what they repeat is actually true. People like to blame the news media for misinformation and manipulation, but I would argue that the greater problem may be those who unquestioningly repeat claims about subjects they know almost nothing about. Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking, “What are the facts?” and began asking, “How does this make me feel?” When feelings become the measure of truth, rational discussion becomes increasingly difficult.

The only way to repair our condition is first to recognize what ails us. We must force ourselves to look beyond the images and return to the written word—the medium that requires us to slow down, consider, question, and reason. Writing freezes speech in place. It allows us to examine an argument without distraction, peer through its veil, apply rhetoric and logic, question its assumptions, and tear it apart until we understand what it actually says and whether it can withstand scrutiny. The written word cannot change the subject when our questions become uncomfortable. It cannot interrupt our thoughts with an advertisement, overwhelm them with music, or steer our emotions with carefully chosen images. The words remain on the page, waiting for us to challenge them.

As a community, we need our paper. We need it focused on local affairs, and, most of all, we need to read it. But information alone is not enough. We need a local group devoted to relearning the tools of rhetoric, logic, and critical analysis—not merely to recognize misinformation when we encounter it, but to strengthen our own arguments and subject our own beliefs to the same scrutiny we demand of others. If we are going to move our community forward, we must become better at determining what is true, better at explaining why we believe it, and willing to discover when we are wrong.

We have allowed our education system to sink our ships; it is time we began mending them and finding our way back to the surface. Let the data centers and Flock cameras be the issues that unite us in that effort, but do not mistake opposition for understanding the problems. Our conclusions should come at the end of our inquiry, not at the beginning. We, my friends, need to be revived, and that revival begins when we stop merely watching and start reading, questioning, discussing, and reasoning again.

Accept nothing without question. Examine everything.