The Importance of Critical Thinking

Years ago I read a book where the description of the marriage struck me.  The wife said something to the effect that she felt her husband made her try to be better every single day.  Yesterday I lunched with a very close friend.  The conversation meandered, as it usually does, but landed on the economy for quite awhile.  I said something about how our economy has been on a melt down for well over two decades, and my friend reacted almost violently.  To her, it was all President George Bush's fault.  And I have to say, my friend is a very very smart person.  She even knows what praxis means without having to look it up every time (like I do!).

Here is the thing.  If we don't try to make our leaders better every day, we have failed democracy.  And we can not, especially now, just think every thing is hunky dory because we have a new President in office.  We need to examine every thing he proposes, yell and scream if we don't think it's good, celebrate if we think it is fabulous.  But to believe that one side is bad and the other is good is, well, naive.

Critical thinking is what is required of us in this democracy.  By simply aligning ourselves with one side or the other, we fail.  And in fact, I think the lack of critical thinking by all sides is one of the reasons we are standing knee deep in quicksand now.

Frankly, I consider myself one of the "team of rivals" for Obama.  Challenge, nudge, scream, yell, demand better.  For too long we neglected our country.  We let people inside the Washington, DC bubble run amok.  Everyone inside that bubble.  It took both parties to tango on these issues, truly.  Wall Street and US corporations didn't care what high powered politicians believed on abortion or saving the Northern spotted owl (trust me, large timber companies wanted the endangered species listing, it put small competing mills out of business, but that is for another day).  But what Wall Street did care about was buying those same politicians, whether liberal or conservative, to look the other way and vote to remove legislative obstacle after obstacle so there  was no oversight on what the geniuses did.  Both parties looked the other way and were richly rewarded.

So, it's become our jobs to be the oversight, to make sure our interests are protected.  And that requires critical thinking.  It's patriotic.