The Right Stuff: We need to remove our blinders – Fairfield Daily Republic

Have you ever wondered why it seems so easy for us to go through life with blinders on?

It seems as a species we have the uncanny ability to absorb only that which we want to see, hear and feel while blocking out everything contradictory. The result is we all get played, to one extent or another, by those who relentlessly put out a message we will feel good about.

Paraphrasing former Vice President Al Gore: Facts are inconvenient things. So, politically, we see advocates on both sides relentlessly spinning facts to agendas.

Thinking for ourselves is hard and we must train ourselves to do it. My wife’s mother had a phrase for her children, especially when they were being intellectually lazy or looking for a shortcut where her Mom would do their work and give them the answer. She would tell them: “You have a brain. Use it.” Another quote I like on the subject of thinking attributed to that very smart, gay, liberal, funny woman Lily Tomlin: “The road to success is always under construction.”

Humanity thinks principally in two ways: One, linear thinking, as in from Point A to Point B, which is analytical, rational and logical characteristically. Our brains are generally wired to want things to simply progress in a straightforward fashion, connecting things sequentially. All being premised upon truth and logic often in short supply in our nonliner world and especially politically over the past four years. Two, nonlinear thinking, which is the opposite, meaning not thinking along straight lines at all. In nonlinear thinking, we make connections among seemingly unrelated concepts or ideas. We draw conclusions from a number of different fields of thought or backgrounds. Nonlinear thinkers are rather abstract in their views.

Simplistically, linear thinkers are binary thinkers where issues are either on or off, yes or no. Nonliner thinkers often excel at the arts and the social science arena where things tend to be more abstract and indefinite by nature. Either type of thinking in extreme is often fruitless and sometimes dangerously wrong.

In America today we seem to have these two types of thinkers, in some ways, identifying politically. The often-older generation (baby boomers, etc.) some labeled as ultra-conservatives with obvious, to them, predictable causes and effects of failed social engineering, and the younger (millennials, etc.) many labeled progressives with obvious, to them, dreams of what should be, each clashing with the other to a serious and potentially dangerous degree.

We have Americans looking at each other as the enemy of freedom and what is right and proper as each side defines it.

We have just gone through four years of constant contention where President Donald Trump was vilified from Day One, where regardless of what positive and good things the president did, and there were many, they were rejected immediately by the so-called progressives.

Any of us who have had children or grandchildren on college campuses know the education establishment has, for years, been all but solely left-wing Democrats in political thought. It’s been turbulent at least and out of control at worst.

Interestingly, we have seen this in the social science (nonlinear) arenas of campuses. Whereas, the math and hard sciences (linear) areas of the campuses were peaceful. This appears universally true from border to border and coast to coast.

We have hard decisions to make. We’re using Covid-19 as a political foil, e.g. the $1.9 trillion so-called Covid Relief Act had only 9% allocated to Covid-specific issues, the rest being partisan pork. Inflation is rearing its ugly head; the stock market seems poised for a sharp correction. Many are worried.

What’s to do, folks? How about we take off our blinders actually think and speak civilly with each other for a change.

Jim McCully is a member of the Solano County Republican Central Committee, Vacaville resident and former Northwest Regional vice chairman of the California State Republican Party.

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