Trump: A Bad Love Story

I must admit that President Trump has been weighing heavily on my mind. Every morning, the first thing I do is search “Donald Trump” in the news. Okay fine – I do it multiple times a day. It’s really like a bad love story.

Firstly – he’s respectable in many ways. He’s incredibly successful. Similar to how a Black Hole is strengthened by the matter it absorbs, Trump is alarmingly able to embolden his ego – and somehow politics – with all negativity exerted on him. But… that’s where it stops. Generally he’s a petty man and should absolutely not be holding the most esteemed office in the world.

So how is it that even with the vast dissemination of information through the internet, the general public worldwide was unable to predict his ascent? Think about it! Mostly everyone in Canada that we know for example, held the belief that Hilary was going to win. But we were wrong: why? Within every nation there exist many pockets of people who have highly contrasting beliefs.

These “pockets of people” are so far removed in either geography, demographic or medium (internet, club, social gatherings, chats, etc) from you that you are highly unlikely to be confronted with opinions that clash with your personal beliefs. One contributor for example is social media. FaceBook and YouTube purposely feed you information that you are already likely to already agree with. In fact, I’m absolutely convinced that FaceBook would have been accurately able to predict the result of this past election. We certainly live in fascinating times.

What does it mean to be a “Good Samaritan”? Recently I was debating with someone about politics who was just downright belligerent. A bunch of my friends said “As soon you debate with this guy, you’ve already lost. Stop wasting your time, don’t stoop down to his level – he’ll never change”. To be honest, I despise this attitude. We can pat ourselves on the back for going to vote – but if we just feed into the small network that we’re in, it may very well be doing more harm than good.

“You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen.” – John Adams

 Being a Good Samaritan means going outside your comfort zone. It means talking to people whose views may clash with your own. It means learning their perspective and trying to understand if it has merit. It can mean changing your own views if you see the light – and it certainly means trying to get others to understand your concerns as well. A good democracy is built on discourse, but in my experience people generally stay in the confinements of the circles they’re already in.

 

A Good Samaritan creates common ground in the circles around us – finding all the intersections in a multi-faceted Venn Diagram. It means taking your opinions and proposed courses of action and speaking up about them. It means vocalizing your concerns to your local constituencies. And in this day and age – a share on FaceBook doesn’t hurt either! 🙂

If there’s one thing Trump can teach us all, it’s that we don’t even need to be remotely close to having a political background to have a societal impact. ALL of us can. I’m definitely not educated in many areas of society, but for me to say that “I’m not a good citizen if I don’t educate myself in every political decision” would be foolish and absolutely impractical. I believe the starting point is to at least be vocal and have discourse about things that we’re passionate & knowledgeable about – especially to people on the other side of the fence.

Anyways, got to figure out what Trump is up to now. Until next time.