Wednesday, November 23, 2016

If You're So Smart...

A white colleague is critical of Trump supporters.  All of them, even though some their individual reasons for voting for Trump were very separate from him as an inept and generally bad person (in any way people want to judge others).  Regardless of his policies and tenuous ties to the GOP, he thinks it should be apparent by voting for an obviously stupid, rudderless, petulant, and immature person as president is really poor judgment, and that people should see that.

Well, everybody doesn't see that.  Not everybody has learned gobs of perspective at college.  Not everybody has traveled to and spend significant time seeing a few cosmopolitan parts of the country, much less lived in another country entirely.  Not everybody reads a lot of books and is able to understand other viewpoints and ways of living/behaving that may be different and still OK.  Not everybody lives in a multi-cultural environment and sees the whole thing -- the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Not everyone has had the benefit if seeing young immigrants struggle to learn English and succeed in America.  Not everybody has been in their houses, seen their effort to survive and still make it.  Not everyone has the benefit of friends and workmates of different persuasions, and has experienced, second hand, some of the things they've experienced.  

OF COURSE, anyone who has had some or most of those experiences, and has been blessed with a critical, open or intelligent mind could never vote for someone who has shown such irresponsible behavior as a public figure.  But clearly there are enough people without that level of discernment.  The long term fix for that is to make it possible for way more people to have some of those experience, like college, overseas experience, and life in multi-cultural worlds (a eventuality that our changing demographics will help with).  How to make them broad readers, curious, open minded?  A tough task, but it's possible that public education could make that one of its priorities for real.

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