A Little Context

Written on October 14, 2016

We can only hope that the final few weeks until the 2016 US elections will be as level-headed as the past 6–12 months have been. Please insert heavy sarcasm into that last sentence if you couldn’t already sense it.

Scan your smartphone, social media feed, TV channels or newsstand and you will get a never-ending supply of the latest scoop on what is truly important in the world. What you won’t get from most of these channels is much context.

Context is the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. But these days we are not interested in fully understanding anything. We’d rather make immediate assumptions about each other and assume the worst. We’d rather grab the latest headline as proof that our side is right and the other side is wrong — instead of trying to understand and solve problems together.

And, of course, all of this nonsense becomes magnified when it is time to select our next group of “leaders”. We need OUR guy or OUR gal in charge because they are always looking out for OUR interests. Except that often they are not. There’s a very select few reaping all sorts of perks while the vast majority of us spend most of our time distracted by the daily grind and constant bickering with one another.

When did we get so collectively lazy that we stopped calling on our leaders to do what they say and work for us? And when did we get so caught up in calling each other out instead of communicating with each other?

Here’s a little context for you. There is/are 1 president, 1 vice president, 100 senators and 435 house representatives leading our country. In the US, there are 10 corporations that dominate TV/radio, 9 corporations that dominate cable/telecommunications, 6 corporations that dominate print and 4 corporations that dominate internet.

By my count, that’s 566 entities trying to sell the rest of us on what is important. Which is funny since the latest census estimate puts our US population at approximately 322 million citizens. Seems a little lopsided, yet we allow this minuscule minority to dictate much of what we think about the world and our next-door neighbors.

Maybe we should stop being spoon-fed by that minority and start seeking out more context. Maybe we should listen to both sides of the story before we assume that we fully understand it.

And maybe we should turn off the news and tune in to each other. With over 322 million of us in the country, there’s lots to learn.