On … Superiority
Seems every wire and airwave in the country is filled with people passing judgment on other people. You can lead people to Sunday School, but you can’t make it sink in….
You young people out there may be puzzled why oldsters pass opinions early and often on any subject that comes up. I know I was, and didn’t feel comfortable chiming in myself until relatively late.
Partially, it was because I couldn’t get a word in edgewise around family and friends. More importantly, I was under the impression you ought to be awful sure of your facts before you uttered some pronouncement. And, the more you know about anything, the more you know how much you don’t know.
Can this lead to a Hamlet syndrome of never doin’ nothin’? Certainly. Seems to me that’s far better, though, than the current trend, which is the childhood game of Gossip run amok.
Here’s an exercise for you: survey several shows on several channels over a few days as a new “story” breaks. (To make it less painful, you can substitute sports for news–the same syndrome applies.) You’ll notice groupthink set in as one show after another starts repeating the same speculation, and using the same phrases. You’ll watch “conventional wisdom” shift from one extreme to another, and probably back again. Months later, an aside will reveal the truth was something never mentioned.
I’d blame Big Media, but there would be no supply if there was no demand. The buck stops with each of us; and the Gossip chain does too.