Reason can’t gain traction

Hopes for healing wounds of the election seem dim at best. Seeking common ground requires at least willing attitudes and discourse tuned into the same reality.

Unfortunately the most recent model for accommodating attitude was a 2008 Republican vow to block the newly elected president’s every initiative and make him fail, regardless of the people’s desperate needs in those economically bleak times. Not really a “common ground” approach and not exactly patriotism’s best moment.

But the most troubling obstacle today is inability to agree on what reality is. Science, truth and broad-based objective analysis don’t count anymore. Instead we have fabricated realities reverberating in an echo chamber of fake news, driven by profiteers preying on willing buyers’ frenzied appetites for fictions that underpin their prejudices and lower passions. And our new president is the loudest and most exploitative voice of this fakery.

Sure, we all formulate our own beliefs and prejudices — our own world views. But world views based on science and truth will never find common ground with world views based on fiction and invented realities. Reason will not get any traction here.

Instead propaganda smothers truth, belief steamrolls reality. It’s called oppression, and we must resist it desperately.

Steve McNutt

Spokane