Step 1: Do your research. What the candidates say is not research. Fox News is not research. Joe Rogan is not research. Research involves facts and data, not speculation and unsubstantiated claims masked as questions to uncover the “actual truth,” because it never does.
Step 2: Question what you read. Don’t just stop at the headline. Ask, “Why?” Ask, “Is this really true?” And follow up. It was discovered a few days after a video surfaced that claims of an immigrant voting multiple times were fake. It was debunked that immigrants were eating pets. Extreme headlines and claims are designed to evoke anger and fear. It’s easy to get riled up by fear and anger. That’s why they’re doing it…because it works.
Step 3: Use critical thinking. This is a lost skill, but if we try hard enough and are open to the possibility that not everything we hear can be true, we can do it. It’s clear when there is a lack of critical thinking. There is no critical thinking when there is no listening. There is no critical thinking when responses to questioning claims are met by more rhetoric, more unsubstantiated claims, and more taglines. There is no critical thinking when being presented with facts triggers personal attacks or short circuits the brain.
Step 4: Vote.
This election is too important. Too much hangs in the balance for women, minorities, immigrants, children, healthcare, and the future of our country. If you can’t see that, are too caught up in anger and fear, or think that a fascist authoritarian cares about you and will do anything for you that doesn’t benefit him, you skipped one or more steps and should go back to step 1.
In case you haven’t heard, we have a big election coming up in the United States. To be fair, many countries are seeing their politics follow the same loud, divisive, truth-adjacent bullying trend that was made popular by the success of one of our “candidates” in 2016.
It’s even worse this year.
It’s also terrifying to think this is the world my son will grow up in.
Candidates are being elected and staying in power by peddling fear and hate for the “other.” The easy group to target is immigrants. Falsehoods about their choice of protein and taking over small towns across the country continued to spread long after they were disproved. But it’s a slippery slope to go from immigrants to those who support immigrants to any group that is different or believes differently. History has not been kind to people like my son, for example. People with disabilities were lumped into the “other,” the inferior, and the unworthy of life.
Too many people believe and repeat the blatant lies coming from these candidates, either because they align with the way they want the world to be or because we have lost the ability to think critically, question what we are told, and discover the truth for ourselves. Even when all the data and science support a particular fact, if it goes against what they want to be true, they’ll lean into their doubt. They’ll claim the other side and media are biased for saying the same thing (e.g., facts), and they’ll listen to the pundits in their echo chamber because surfacing “alternative facts” makes them “unbiased.” They think their doubt makes them clever. They’re mistaking cleverness for ignorance.
They think their doubt makes them clever. They’re mistaking cleverness for ignorance.
Single-issue voters are willing to look the other way and ignore the unpalatable aspects of a candidate as long as the candidate holds (or says they hold) the same position on a specific issue. “Sure, this candidate is a felon, racist, sexist, fascist dictator, but they’re pro-life, which is the only thing that matters.” Worse, they’ll combine their logic with the doubters above and try to justify their position by convincing themselves that the other labels are misunderstood, out of context, or “just politics.” They can’t believe someone who agrees with their position on a key issue could be a monster, even if the candidate only claims to agree to get enough votes to push a much more dystopian, self-serving agenda.
This includes people who believe that our political system is broken and that bringing in an outsider is the way to fix it. If one candidate represents the establishment, regardless of their policies or fitness to lead, they won’t get the vote. Even in a crisis where the country would benefit from someone who understands the system, and even if the non-establishment candidate is unqualified, a criminal, incompetent, and dangerous, they believe that voting for and electing an outsider will make the country better.
When I was in history class, we read about World War II and asked how a country could elect a party and a person who would ultimately commit such atrocities on the world. I couldn’t understand how millions of people could minimize or normalize the extreme rhetoric, the hate, and the violence. It seemed so unfathomable that anyone could look the other way or fully support their country’s direction.
But here we are, nearly a century later, repeating history. People are spreading the idea that our country has lost its way and that we need to go back, that outsiders are a threat to our national identity, and that the other side is what will cause our country’s collapse. Fear, hate, us versus them—it’s the same playbook. And the party and its people are going along with it because it’s more important to win and be in control than to be good and do good. When you’re willing to win at any cost, humanity loses.
It makes me wonder if, 100 years from now, students will sit in a history class wondering how we let this happen. They’ll have the benefits of time and hindsight to see the similarities between parties trying to make their countries great again at any cost because they were too focused on looking back at what they thought their country was instead of looking forward to what it could become.
When our son was seven years old, after he had mostly stabilized and we had left the hospital, we began teaching him how to ride a bike. Or, rather, we began to reteach him how to ride a bike. The motor skills he developed riding a balance bike when he was three and then a bicycle with training wheels were wiped away and replaced by imbalance and ataxia during the early years of his seizures.
We brought his bike to a city park and found a quiet corner near the grass. I got him on his bicycle and ran behind him, pushing from behind as he found his footing on the pedals towards my wife further down the path. After he found the motion, I would slow down, and he would continue under his own power until he reached his mom, who would help slow him down and repeat the sequence to send him back to me.
I learned to run a bike the same way. My mother and grandfather pushed me on the street in front of my grandparent’s house for hours until I could ride alone. My mother probably learned the same way from my grandfather, who probably learned the same way from his parents. In many ways, parenting is a hand-me-down exercise where we learn how to be a parent from our parents.
But what happens when the approach or behavior that was done to you is not what you want for your child? Whether it’s because new information invalidated an outdated approach or times have changed, the techniques may not apply today. Or, for many people, we’ve learned what was done to us is considered abuse and is not a legacy we want to pass down to our children.
In those situations, our references are tainted. What we know is unusable. The only option we have is to figure it out for ourselves.
Figuring it out is the scary part. I’m constantly afraid that I’m not doing the right thing as a parent and that I will end up doing it worse than my parents did.
But maybe the fear is a sign that we’re on the right path.
It shows that we’re not just blindly repeating the past but actively trying to do better. Learning to parent without a perfect roadmap is daunting, but we are making progress every time we break a harmful cycle or approach our children with more empathy and understanding than we were given.
We may not have all the answers, but we have the ability to grow, adapt, and create a new kind of legacy—one built on love, effort, and the determination to raise our children with more care than we received.
