Time for Everything

By SAM URETSKY

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 is great stuff, although it does go on for a while. That’s the part that begins:

There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

2 a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

3 a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

It goes on that way until you start to think that it was cribbed from an antonym dictionary. One comment on a Youtube video was “Words by God, arrangement by Pete Seeger.”

One of the lines that isn’t included is “a time to read, a time to write” but we may have hit upon just that time. Reading is good, but there’s stuff that you already know. It’s time to shout it, write it, and somehow deliver the message. Consider the House committee investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. It was carried on C-SPAN, streaming on YouTube and on the Internet, everywhere except Fox. the people who most needed the information were insulated from the facts. This is Ignorance at its most Invincible. Confirmation Bias, the ability to ignore information that doesn’t fit our preconceptions, is a very powerful force.

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of confirmation bias was shown by the Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper, who traveled to Iowa to confront the MAGA crowd with the facts. The people he interviewed had never heard of the Jan. 6 riots, and then refused to believe the evidence. As Chico Marx said in “Duck Soup” (1933) “Well, who ya gonna believe me or your own eyes?”

The problem is that the Red Hat contingent had not only preconceptions, but no real exposure to the truth. When Mr. Klepper showed one of them a video of Ivanka Trump, who  previously had high credibility among Trump supporters, denying the Big Lie, one viewer said “that doesn’t even look like her.” A single video, a news report from an untrusted source such as the New York Times or Washington Post, will never be enough to overcome years of indoctrination. In Wyoming, 22 state House and Senate seats are set to go uncontested in both the August primary and November general elections, meaning that the national Democratic party doesn’t see any value in spending money on a doomed campaign, but it also means that the voters will hear only one side of the story.

There is an answer though, and if it isn’t all it might be, it’s easy and inexpensive – show your colors, create a groundswell, use the media. Consider the effects of television coverage of President Trump’s rallies, where the viewers were confronted by a sea of red hats. This is essentially the Bandwagon effect. As described by Investopedia “The bandwagon effect is a psychological phenomenon in which people do something primarily because other people are doing it, regardless of their own beliefs, which they may ignore or override. This tendency of people to align their beliefs and behaviors with those of a group is also called a “herd  mentality.”  This is not a time to watch – it’s a time to go out and buy a blue hat, and give one or two as gifts.

Use the media. In a Pew study of Twitter users  a minority of extremely active tweeters produced the overwhelming majority of all tweets made by US adults between June 12 and Sept. 12, 2021. During this period, the top 25% of users by tweet volume produced 97% of all tweets (which includes original tweets as well as retweets, replies, and quote tweets). Find a good Facebook post and share it with all your “friends”

Decisionlab.com reported “Researchers exposed potential voters to two messages, either one that emphasized high voter turnout or one that emphasized low voter turnout. They found that among the voters with low expected turnout rates, individuals were more likely to say they would vote if they received the high turnout message, while voters with high expected turnout rates were not affected either way by the messages.”

Comment on online editorials and even on comic strips, There is a time to read and time to write “I swear it’s not too late.”

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2022

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