Forced To A World Of Extremists

July 18, 2008

Extremists are trying to force the rest of us into their molds. These extremists, be they left or right, liberal or conservative, Muslim or Christian, whatever, expect you to recite exactly what they believe without questioning. If you deviate from any of their beliefs in the least little bit, these extremists then accuse you of being the exact opposite of them and you are now their mortal enemy. You are not allowed to think for yourself, just accept every little thing they preach without question.

No matter how noble much of what these extremists preach may sound, there are also a lot of errors, bad assumptions, and self serving statements among all these extremists' preachings. The truth or best course of action is usually somewhere between these extremes.

Most of these extremists are also hypocrites who don't practice what they preach. They tend to pick and choose from among their preachings those things that are convenient for them and ignore the rest. But they still expect the rest of us to fully adhere to their preachings.

The trouble is that the mass media is also trying to force each of us into one of these extremist camps. The media is not comfortable with people who are somewhere in between. The reasons for this are:

1) Extremists are thought to be better news and get better ratings than those in the middle. Consequently, the media tends to give the extremists most all of the attention and ignore the rest of us.

2) The media prefers simple things that are easy to label. Therefore, the media wants to force each of us into one of these easy to recognize and label extremist categories. They find people who do not neatly fit into one of these convenient extremist categories too confusing to deal with.

We need to resist this pressure from the extremists and from the media to join one of the extremes. Think for yourself and question what you hear from all sides of an issue.

Back to Rants and Raves