Someone recently included in their local newspaper opinion piece the statement,
“All rational-thinking citizens know that..”
which was of course followed by an assertion approximately as questionable as Susan Roesgen‘s coverage of angry taxpayer tea parties on CNN.
Dismissing an opposing viewpoint before it can even be heard smacks of propoganda and strong-arm tactics far more than it does fair debate or even (gasp!) consensus-building.
Lately, however, this seems sadly typical of cowardly progressives who are more interested in “winning” an argument than in supporting a position– or even (gasp!) finding the truth.
If we are to find our way as a nation, and even (gasp!) as a species, we must continually question the accuracy of assertions, the scales of their paradigms, the authority of their sponsors, and any other distortion or omission of facts that could lead us to implement someone’s amateur social engineering experiment in place of the right solution for a clearly understood issue.
Public policy cannot be built upon alleged facts that “everybody knows”. Facts, figures, perspective, creativity, and consensus are the order of the day– public policy demands nothing less.
Fail in this, and “everybody knows” will devolve into “everbody says, ‘Oh, no'”.