Think critically about the future is the best criteria for citizenparticipation

Ken La Salle — As this political season heats up, look around you. What do you see? Aside from the ubiquity of money here and sound bites there, there’s one way to split all of the political rhetoric right down the middle and that is with a tool call “cynicism.” It’s everywhere, and it has been since long before I was born. But it is very useful in understanding just what our society is going to need going forward, what the next generation of voters are going to need: a well-tuned, perhaps even flawless, bullshit detector.

You see, I was born just before the age of Vietnam, Watergate, and what we’ve come to know as political cynicism. Back then, there was a sense of trust in politics that came out of World War II, the Cold War, and the Space Race. Politicians seemed to do their job and many of them seemed to do it well. (Let’s not kid ourselves though; there’s a reason I’m leaning heavy on the qualifiers. Incompetence is not a new invention but, all the same, there was a sense of trust.)

I saw that trust mirrored in the political decisions of so many people older than myself—old enough to vote, as I was growing up. But then, as I mentioned, things began to change. The 1970s were a kind of turning point that fostered cynicism in the system. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” may have been coined in 1964, just a year before I was born, but my generation appeared to listen. We didn’t trust anyone very much and, when we did, we couldn’t wait to tear them down.

Politicians learned very quickly that many in my generation weren't going to trust them and they played that card to their advantage. They used their power to steer our distrust. Many of us learned to distrust unions, with the reasoning that unions were the fat cats with all the money and the corporations were helpless before them. We were taught to distrust the poor who needed help, rather than focusing on the rich who kept getting richer. We learned to distrust hippies and social workers and progressives and all the way to people with the name Mohammed.

We were played. And in the process, we let all those who would steal from the poor and rape the environment and cripple our government get away with crime after crime. That’s actually one way to split the voting public these days: those who are gullible and those who are misguided by their distrust.

What we lack are the critical thinking skills necessary to hack our way through the web of lies politicians so often spew. This should come as no surprise. Our schools discourage critical thinking and push conformity all the way down to their daily tests. We’re raising a generation of kids who can follow in a straight line and take the same tests but who are never trained to think for themselves.

And that’s what you should be focusing on this political season and in every political season that follows. Focus on the wave of voters coming towards the booths. Are they going to be brainwashed to follow in line or make the mistake of being steered by the lies? Or are we going to step up and begin teaching them the critical thinking skills they’ll need to understand just what’s going on?

There’s another name for critical thinking, by the way. It’s called a “bullshit detector”. Most people don’t get theirs in schools, for the reason mentioned above. Most of us pick ours up when we’re teenagers, when we begin to realize things are not really what they seem.

But in a climate where politicians and just about anyone who wants to benefit of our backs know how to play those without critical thinking skills, it’s important that we each step up and hone those skills for all they’re worth. Forget about the schools; take charge yourself! You can go old-school and pick up a book or two in science or history or you can tap into the new technology and become informed.

Knowledge is the only way to really sharpen a bullshit detector, and if we don’t all start educating ourselves we’ll keep finding ourselves played over and over again.



About the Author

Author and playwright, Ken La Salle has brought his shows to stages from Los Angeles to New York to San Francisco. His passion is intense humor, meaningful drama, and finding answers to the questions that define our lives. You can find his books on Amazon and Smashwords and all major retailers. His philosophical memoir Climbing Maya was recently published by Solstice Publishing as an ebook and in paperback. You can follow Ken’s writing career on his website at www.kenlasalle.com.

The joy of meeting people

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A Dad’s Point-of-View, by Bruce Sallan - Meeting people in real life, in person, is cool.  I write and speak a great deal about technology and social interaction.  It’s my belief that modern technology offers wondrous things but, as with just about everything, there is a down side.  That “down side” is that you can be lulled to believe that you can do everything you need to do from the comfort of your computer.  Yes, you can do much more than at any time in human history, but the value of direct people contact cannot be replaced by any new tech device, app, software, or web site.

This was dramatically demonstrated on a recent trip to New York, where I combined business and pleasure and found the pleasure of meeting people to be not only joyful but also informative and invaluable in ways I’d almost forgotten about, considering my attachment to technology.

I’m not bashful, to say the least, so I talk to everyone.  Literally.  I struck up conversations with every taxi driver whose cab I entered.  In the crowded subway, I met a young Danish girl of Vietnamese heritage and in the space of one stop I learned her incredible story.  Being “social” got my son and me into the airline lounge for free, when our plane was delayed, whereas sitting back would’ve stuck us in the main, loud, uncomfortable airport waiting areas for several hours.

We parents model the behavior we want from our children.  My son got a great lesson in assertiveness, through observing my regular interactions with various people we encountered. To him, however, it was also sprinkled with an equal amount of me embarrassing him (24, 25 times?) by just being “Me!.”

In the space of four and a half days, some of the things we experienced from this direct interaction with people and places were:

~~ We met a young girl, while smashed together on the subway, who was doing a world tour before beginning medical school in Holland. In the space of ONE stop, I learned that her parents were boat people after the fall of Saigon, that her father was rescued by a Norwegian ship while in his early teens, and that he attended high school in Holland, where he met his wife who was also a survivor of the horrid post-war times in Vietnam.  He became an engineer and they had five children, the youngest of which was next to me, telling me her wonderful, engaging story.  As you can see, this is who I am -- talking to everybody, loving it, learning, interacting -- and as you can also understand, it’s why I probably under-estimated the number of times I embarrassed my son.

~~ We hung out with my virtual friend Adam Cohen (@dadarocks) who took us to the most incredible restaurant for dessert, Max Brenners. Adam is one of those people I “knew” from Twitterl, but now got the pleasure of not only meeting but getting to really “know.” There is no doubt that 140 characters have their limits!  Adam was beyond gracious to me and David, and David got a taste of how a New Yorker handles things, since Adam was born and raised there, and has his own unique style of “getting it done.”  His style is persistent, direct, and explains his 76 Klout (a Twitter measure of influence) and other top-of-the-list statistics as a dad blogger/influencer.

~~ Ground Zero where I was moved and impacted in ways I hadn’t imagined.



~~ I met a taxi driver from a small town in Ghana, who knew Pastor Frank Bennin, who runs the girl’s school that I’ve been supporting through my writing and radio show. Pastor Bennin’s kids befriended me on Facebook - yet another marvel of the Internet that we’d connect this way.  But, what are the odds that I’d meet a man from Ghana, on a trip to New York, who happened to know the little township of Agona Swedru?



~~ I spoke at the #140conf*, a Social Media conference where I met dozens of people that I only knew “virtually.” We discussed, shared, and got to know each other in ways that non-verbal, non-direct communication just cannot do.  In many cases, we came up with business ideas and other things we might join forces on that never would have happened without the face-to-face time.

~~ I met people of every ethnicity, stripe, color, and any other human distinction by visiting Times Square, day and night, The Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, Macy’s (the largest department store in the world), The Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center and the “Top of the Rock,” Chinatown (for dim sum and boba), saw four musicals (“Spiderman” - front row seats, “Memphis,” “Mary Poppins,” and “Baby, It’s You”), visited FAO Schwartz where I did a Tom Hanks (from the movie, “Big”) and danced/played on their full-size walk and play on piano, Greenwich Village for pizza at the infamous “John’s Pizza” restaurant, The Apple Store, the gorgeous display of masks in front of The Plaza Hotel, did a video interview with my son in Times Square, watched the “Today” show being broadcast “live,” and visited the Harry Potter exhibit at the Discovery Museum. Plus, taxi, taxi, taxi, walk, walk, walk, subway, subway, subway.

So, do you think getting out and seeing the world, interacting with people, learning and doing it away from the comforts of home, is worth it? I sure do!

*Here’s a link to my travelogue article on the trip to New York which has a link to view my “talk:” http://bit.ly/140confNY

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Bruce’s first book, A Dad’s Point-of-View: We ARE Half the Equation is available at Amazon and the store at BruceSallan.com: http://brucesallan.com/index.php/store. Bruce Sallan’s column, “A Dad’s Point-of-View,” is carried in over 100 newspapers and websites worldwide. Please listen to “The Bruce Sallan Show - A Dad’s Point-of-View,” his one-hour radio show, which is available anytime, via live stream, or to download for free on BruceSallan.com.  Everything about Bruce’s radio show, including which stations carry it “live,” and all of Bruce’s writing and other information, is accessible at: http://www.brucesallan.com. Bruce created and launched a website for those who would like Tech help, called BoomerTechTalk (http://www.BoomerTechTalk.com). Find Bruce on Facebook by joining his “A Dad’s Point-of-View” page: http://www.facebook.com/aDadsPointOfView. You can also follow Bruce at Twitter: http://twitter.com/BruceSallan.