I was listening to the radio (NPR) this morning and the reporter had interviewed a teenage girl about her website which highlights her skepticism of the human impact on global warming. In the interview, David Kestenbaum said something that struck me. He was talking about how we allow others to make decisions for us, he said, "Most of us delegate, decide to believe someone we trust. We don't actively seek out the other side. We probably wouldn't know what to make of it, or how to reconcile the two. Who has time? Or the expertise?"
I see this happening a lot in the world. There are some things that are certainly of non-consequence that we don't need to express an opinion on all the time. My wife pretends to care about my opinion when she asks me what I want to do this weekend, although she already has the entire weekend planned out. (As a matter of fact she has the entire summer planned out already.) That is not something that really matters to me. I am OK trusting my wife to make those decisions. But when it comes to things like politics or religion, I think we need to understand for ourselves so we can make educated decisions and not rely on someone else to decide for us. Mostly because that other person probably doesn't really have our best interests in mind. It all reminds me of sheep being herded from one place to the next.
I consider myself to be a moderate Republican (maybe a little more left leaning on some topics than others). I do not believe that voting along party lines for the sake of maintaining party loyalties is appropriate. I recognize that our political leaders in the House and Senate need to make concessions, but once they get elected on whatever platform they have, they now should represent the people, not their party.
With the major issues we have in the country and the world right now, we need to stop allowing others to do the thinking for us, we need to educate ourselves on the issue that matter to us, and express our opinions to our representatives. We should stop allowing the few influential people from herding us because we (generally speaking) don't want to think about it or its too hard.
