The other day, I happened to see on the satellite directory The American President, a favorite movie of mine, despite it’s being dated, its political inaccuracies, and its hokey ending. One of the reasons I like it is that it offers hope – that and the line that the President (played by Michael Douglas) levels at his ultra-conservative political opponent about the ACLU, words to the effect that, if you’re so big on the Constitution, why are you so opposed to people exercising their Constitutional rights.
But… as I was thinking about the movie, I realized that, in one very crucial way, almost all political movies are dated because they embody the idea that a candidate can change people’s minds by speaking, campaigning, or even outlining absolutely accurate and verifiable facts in an equally accurate context.
Today, most people don’t listen very much, and very few listen to anything that might change their opinion. As events in Washington, D.C., demonstrated last week, that becomes a serious problem for society as a whole when people believe in events that did not happen based on inaccurate or non-existent facts and do not listen to anything outside their “bubble.”
This problem isn’t just in the political sphere. It’s everywhere. Almost all the teachers I know report that one of the biggest problems they face is that students don’t listen well, and that even when they try, they have a hard time retaining facts and information. Part of this, I suspect, is because they want to be entertained and spoon-fed answers and resist any instruction that requires more effort on their part. This wouldn’t be such an enormous problem if it weren’t for the fact that fewer and fewer of them read, and less and less reading is required in most school systems.
“Personalized” news just magnifies the problem, as has the isolation resulting from the Covid pandemic, because people tend to stay within their personal comfort zone.
Will people ever get back to listening?
I’m generally an optimist, but this is one area that challenges that optimism.