Why It Is So Hard To Have A Reasonable Diaologue

Have you noticed how difficult it is to have a discussion politically today that actually has any depth? What is normally found is nothing more than people throwing talking points back and forth. Frankly, if you turn on the television so called experts, that is what they do as well. Little substance ever comes to the surface. Why? I have found in debating that I will put forth a blog that I had written from a deep dive study reading several books by several authors on the topic, but it is dismissed out of hand since I wrote it. Yet they counter it with an opinion piece from the media, not even an investigative article, or with a Wikipedia post. People Wiki is fine if you know nothing about a topic and want a quick overview, but please do not take it as a factual account because you never know how accurate it might be.

I believe it is caused by several things, but nothing more so than the lack of quality education in our school systems going back into the 50s when we as a nation quit teaching our children history, economics, philosophy, and civics well. There was, starting then an assault on our history revising what those Progressives who took over our education system wanted us to learn. It truly began with the five volume American History written by President Woodrow Wilson in 1902. Wilson, a devoted racist, erased the stories of all the African American heroes of the Revolutionary and Civil War, as well as those who were early Congressmen after Reconstruction. It wasn't until recently some have been reinstated.

One of the most quoted books about American History by historians is Alexis de Tocqueville "Democracy In America," written during the Andrew Jackson administration. This book was reedited in 1956 and this "new" edition was reduced from the 804 pages plus another 166 pages of Appendix and became only 317 pages, removing every mention of the vital importance faith in God and religion had in the American system of government and every day life. One of the most important books, and if you read it published after 1956 you only read 35% of what Tocqueville wrote.

Our history has been taught in the most boring, irrelevant, and most forgettable way possible. History is rife with stories of daring adventure, bravery, selflessness, good and evil, men and women who did extraordinary things against all odds. It is edge of your seat compelling stories, that our schools make as dry as dust, where dates are more important than what happened and why. Could this be on purpose so people will not "like" history and never learn it? If it was done intentionally it couldn't have been more effective and destroying a nation of its heritage. I am not sure it wasn't intentional.

Our news media has been bought and paid for by political parties starting in the early 1800s. By 1840 partisan concerns linked the post office branches and the party-controlled newspapers by reducing the cost of distribution through the mails. From 1800 to 1840, the number of newspapers transmitted through the mails rose from 2 million to almost 140 million at far cheaper rates than other printed matter. Postal historian Richard John estimated that if newspapers had paid the same rate as other mails, the transmission costs would have been 700 times higher.

"The new party system with its media partnerships, by 1840, had compromised the independence of the mails and a large part of the print media with no small consequences. Among other defects, the subsidies created incentives to read newspapers, rather than books. This democratization of the news produced a population of people who thought they knew a great deal about current events, but who lacked the theoretical grounding in history, philosophy, or politics to properly ground their opinions." Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen.

If that was true in 1840, how much more so today with the 24/7 news cycle. We are bombarded nonstop with news on the Internet, Television networks, cable, radio, and print. However, without the depth of understanding of history, economics, civics, and philosophy people are tossed too and fro like a bobber on the never ending waves of the news reports.

We need to embrace our history, we need to learn it, understand who we are by understanding where we came from. Our schools won't teach it, so it is up to you to learn it and then to make sure that you kids learn it from you. Better yet, learn it together with your kids. Your Republic depends on it.