By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Having survived our mid-week tour through the eye of the storm known as the Grand Cross, we can look back and discover yet again that the sky didn’t fall in the way we expected it to. We humans come by our tendency toward literalism honestly. When someone tells us the barn is on fire, we expect to smell smoke. When we hear that the president was born in Kenya, we want to see baby pictures outside the family homestead. When we hear the nation is in trouble, we look around and see if not just ourselves, but our neighbors and friends as well, are struggling, because seeing is believing — or at least it used to be.
For several years, believing seemed to come first for many of us, not only defining the way we saw things, but the way we insisted on seeing them. It’s always easier to find the simplistic view when our educational system prefers religious opinion to science and history; it’s more comfortable to see the world through a filter of nationalistic propaganda than through stark reality. When we stopped teaching and encouraging critical thinking in our young, subjecting them to impassioned religious rhetoric entwined in absolutes as a matter of course — like climate change denial, re-written history, and expectations of sexual abstinence rather than sound sex ed — how can we expect them to discover their betrayal at the hands of pay-for-play politicians and for-profit corporations? Whom can they trust?
Black and white thinking is not only the most adolescent way in which to view life on Planet Terra — zero sum, winners/losers, good/evil — but has become the default position in our culture, sold to us over decades by those who have methodically milked the cash cow of our ignorance. Nuanced thinking, on the other hand, not only demands a longer view and deeper understanding of human behavior, it requires us to develop and use compassion and empathy, to approach problem solving from a wider spectrum of possibility. It asks us to break through the thick walls of literal religious rhetoric and cultural superstition, to work our spiritual muscle, let in a little more light.