FOLLOWING THE HERD.
by Christian Farmer
I think that these days people are too quick to trust news media. I think they’re less likely to do any digging of their own, and I think the media are less trustworthy and more biased than ever, not necessarily in the name of a political agenda, but out of a desire to gain more money, to gain more readers and bow down to the Almighty God of the 21st century: The Dollar.
When Obama won the last presidential election, everybody hailed it as this “great landslide victory” saying that he won it by the biggest margin, in both the electoral and popular vote, in 20 years. And nobody even bothered to check the facts.
Even if you just do a quick Wikipedia search, you’ll see that the difference between Clinton Bob Dole was 49.2% of the popular vote to 40.7% of the popular vote, and 379 electoral votes to 159. So 8.5% difference in total voters, and 220 electoral votes. If you compare this to Obama vs. McCain, Obama had 52.9% of the vote, while McCain had 45.7% of the vote, Obama 365 electoral votes, McCain 173. So A difference of only 7.2% of the popular vote, and a difference of only 192 electoral votes. The 2008 presidential election wasn’t the “biggest landslide in 20 years” it was merely the largest difference since the 1996 Clinton-Dole election. Just 3 elections before it. Just 12 years difference, barely more than a decade. But the media wanted to tout it as historical, and the people let them do it without checking any facts on their own.
Since when is winning 52.9% of the popular vote a landslide? Since when can’t people do math on their own? The media in this country are scary and want to make up stories to sell news, to gain hits on their websites. We need to learn to do our own research, and we need to start questioning the sensationalistic bull**** the media is feeding us. We need to stop the herd mentality many of us succumb to every day by blindly following our leaders, and we need to stop opposing anyone for critiquing the thought processes of those leaders.
The United States of America was born out of a desire to gain autonomy from dictators. Our founding fathers set this country up to make us all independents, giving every single person the right to question all of our political leaders. And instead we’ve devolved into a system where we let the legislators and the President have too much power over us, where others exclaim to those who think for themselves that “Thou Shalt Not Question the President.”
It’s time for all of us, Democrats, Republicans and Independents, to start thinking for ourselves. It’s time we start using the right to independence the Founding Fathers gave us, rather than throwing their whole system in the trash.