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Barbara Mezeske: We need to think critically about what we hear. – HollandSentinel.com

Oct 6th, 2022

Barbara Mezeske| Community Community

Do you know a person who doesnt like her body? Someone who catches a glimpse of herself in a store window and turns away? Who always thinks her thighs are fat? Her chest too flat? Her stomach bloated? The condition is called body dysmorphia, and mostly affects women, but can affect young men as well.

It is caused by our culture, which celebrates slimness and bombards us with images of perfect bodies, even though lots of those images are photo-shopped. There are serious consequences of hating your own body: shame, radical dieting or radical exercise, and lack of self-confidence.

Repeated exposure to images or ideas embeds those ideas in our conscious and subconscious minds.

Thats what has happened to our country. We are suffering from a kind of political dysmorphia, one that makes us question the very fundamentals of our democracy.

Lets start with the biggest elephant in the room: The belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. This assertion has been tested again and again in local election precincts, by local sheriffs and state police, by the Department of Homeland Security, and by more than 60 lawsuits in multiple states. Every time, every investigative body and every court concluded that the election was fair, and decisively won by Joe Biden.

Nevertheless, public figures continue to proclaim their belief or suspicion that the election was stolen. The chief of these is the former president. There is also the wife of a Supreme Court justice, and the GOP candidates for all three major Michigan offices: governor, attorney general and secretary of state. Sometimes all it takes is a whisper of doubt, repeated often and amplified in social and commercial media. The old proverb says a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is pulling on its boots.

Next is the assertion that the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are not trustworthy that they are, in fact, corrupt and politicized. The FBIs search of Mar-a-Lago followed months of back-and-forth between the former president and his lawyers, and the National Archives. The raid was not a sudden descent of jack-booted troops: It was the culmination of well-founded suspicion that documents that belonged in government hands were squirreled away at the Florida mansion. And the suspicion was true.

The DOJ investigations of the former presidents business dealings in New York and his attempts to interfere with vote counting in Georgia are what happens if you inflate and deflate property values in order to gain a tax advantage, or if you try to pressure election officials to put their thumbs on the scale in your favor. This is how the law works for any citizen, though most are not as likely to have a national platform to complain that everything is a witch hunt by a corrupt system. One has to wonder how many crooks and criminals would like to claim that the system was rigged against them personally, and that they should therefore go free.

Are there corrupt or incompetent people serving in the DOJ or the FBI? Almost certainly. Any large organization, be it educational, religious, or corporate, has to guard against corruption and incompetence. That doesnt mean that such organizations are wholly degraded or ineffective. We have seen over and over since the 2020 election that there are Republicans who know how to lose without trying to overturn the democratic institutions that framed the contest. Peter Meijer is one of them. So are Adam Kinzinger, Chris Sununu and Liz Cheney.

When a major cable network like FOX is wedded to a single point of view, is complicit in repeating conspiracy theories and lies, and willing to sacrifice objectivity to ratings then, by virtue of repetition, the accusations and insinuations, the cries of unfair! and witch hunt!, settle in peoples minds. FOX News is the No. 1 cable news channel, watched in prime time by over 2.2 million viewers. It is a major source of our current political dysmorphia.

The ideas being embedded in our public consciousness are a distrust of government, a belief that public servants are corrupt, and the idea that institutions must be resisted or overthrown, sometimes with violence, as on Jan. 6, 2021.

The consequences of these embedded and for the most part false ideas is this: If people dont believe in the institutions of democracy, and behave as though those institutions have already failed, then they contribute to the destruction of that democracy. Like women looking into the mirror, they see what they have been conditioned to see, and the consequences are deep despair, cynicism and anger.

The bottom line is this: We need to think critically about what we hear. We need to learn to distinguish between truth and lies, and between facts and opinions. We need to broaden our sources of information everyone, not just FOX viewers to include alternate points of view.

What we take into our heads matters to our mental and physical health, and to the health of our democratic institutions.

Community Columnist Barbara Mezeske is a retired teacher and resident of Park Township. She can be reached at bamezeske@gmail.com.

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Barbara Mezeske: We need to think critically about what we hear. - HollandSentinel.com

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