Governing by Twitter

Social media is fine among friends; it keeps people in touch, even families. It is even useful as a form of cheap marketing to local people in need of products and services. Small businesses find this useful, affordable and accessible.

Social media is also fine for airing opinions and scanning trending thoughts on common issues.

It is not good, however, to discuss issues. Sound bites are the rule in social media, not complete sentences and fully formed ideas. That takes chat rooms or other two-way/group communication protocols. Webpages often host such discussions.

Sound bites are good for put-downs, jokes, and ads. They are easily distorted to ruthlessly stop discussion, feed manic rants, and the like. Accordingly, sound bites are not useful governing communications.

Sound bites are propaganda tools. Plain and simple.

Want to roil a crowd? Use sound bites. 8 words or less. ‘Lock her up’ is a good example. Has no substance, fact or supporting thought. Just an emotion, a declarative. Empty. But effective in stirring up a crowd.

Want to make a crowd think? Ask them questions. Ask for their concentration on some core thoughts. Then pose more questions to get them to think more deeply on the issue. This does not stir up the crowd; it calms them down. For many it is boring, but then, crowd behavior is not apt for discussion.

No, discussion requires smaller venues, fewer people, and an atmosphere conducive to discussing fine points of logic related to the topic under discussion. It takes patience, thoughtfulness, and some diplomacy to discuss many issues of our day.

So heated are opinions, so riled up are large groups of people, that arguments begin with use of key phrases.

We face many critical issues: Do we continue to invite immigrants to our shores and embrace them for their diversity and cultural differences, and talents? Do we respect women and their bodies? Do we allow women full control of their own bodies like we do that of men? Do we accommodate and welcome differences among us like ethnicity, skin color and so much more?

We don’t. You know we don’t. Those questions are all loaded in our current events: How big a government do we need or want? How do we care for one another in need? What responsibility do we have for each other? All good questions. All important to discuss with one another and create consensus so we can manage the issues with care and intelligence.

This will take calm discussion. Factual discussion. A willingness to do some research on aspects of the issues and bring them forth to continue discussions. All of these behaviors require us to respect one another and calm our speech. These are not characteristics of social media in 2018. So other venues are needed away from the hustle and bustle.

Who starts this and when? Not a president who twitters incessantly on many issues instead of building consensus as true leaders would. Indeed; who will lead on these issues?

Both political parties in America need to develop leadership among their supporters. They should have been doing this all along. It is not about winning elections. It is about leading a nation. It is about public service. These are not phrases that describe the state of our current political parties. Just the opposite.

And that’s a shame. Let’s start there and find leaders who can do the job we all need.

October 10, 2018