Digging Deeper

As a followup to a comment in my last entry, Agitation, that "we've become a culture that expects simple solutions to everything and prefers sound bites to complexity and nuance," I confess that I am often part of the problem.

People who are acquainted with me probably think I'm quite politically aware. People who really know me are more likely to know that I'm generally politically aware, but that I'm often short on specifics.

I generally know about things like the trouble in Iran, Darfur and Gaza, President Bush's veto of funding for stem cell research and our lack of progress on the immigration issue, Salt Lake mayor Rocky Anderson's efforts to make city government greener, etc. But I'm pretty sure I could not engage in deep, meaningful discussion about any of these issues.

Like many people (if they'd only admit it), the things I do know have pretty much come to me by way of sound bites. (And frankly it scares me that there are plenty of people who spend a whole lot less time paying attention to the world around us than I do who have far more entrenched opinions about things than I do!)

So I hereby pledge to dig more deeply.

I'm going to listen to more in-depth interviews, read whole newspaper articles rather than just skimming headlines, and read entire books on subjects like the Middle East. I might even take notes.

Each week I'm going to focus in depth on one country. I plan to visit the websites for Unicef and Infoplease (I've added the links to my side bar) for an overview of history, politics and culture and any humanitarian issues facing the country. I'll also spend time reading any current news articles I can find and looking for photos online. Initially I was going to focus on one country a day but quickly realized that I'd never get out of the soundbite mentality that way.

Maybe one day, I'll not only be able to name every single African, South American, Eastern European, Asian, Middle Eastern country on a map (something I'm ashamed to say I can't do today), but I'll know something about the unique history and cultures of each.

(An aside: as I write this I realize how totally biased my childhood education was--by the time I finished sixth grade, I could--and still can--easily name every Western European country and I had a fairly clear sense of each. And the only other countries I really knew anything about were countries where the US had fought wars or that someone in my family had visited.)