“How do you know that?” he asked me. In need of a bathroom, I had entered an open door in the school along my route. When I couldn’t find a public restroom, I stopped the first person in the building I could find. He looked like a student cadre member at a military school. He let me use his own private facilities in his ensuite dorm room.
How we got started about which news you could trust, I don’t know. But when he made a comment regarding ‘facts’ about the new administration, I replied: “But the media is biased toward the left’s political agenda!”
That’s when he came back with the question that stymied me. How DID I know that?
I couldn’t very well reply:
- Well, that’s what I read/hear/think!
If that’s all I can come up with, then I’m no better than the non-thinking masses. You know about whom I’m writing? – the ones I accuse of just parroting what they hear, without sorting out reasons for what they believe?
That dialogue and unsettling realization about my lack of preparedness took place in a snippet of last night’s dream.
But a real-live similar conversation last fall in Boston got me thinking about my deficit in study.
Sharing a room with a teacher colleague afforded plenty of time to talk. She and I engaged at one point in some discussion about a few controversial issues taking place in our home state of North Carolina. The issue that revealed my gaps was the so-called ‘bathroom law’. I found that I could not articulate well why I found it objectionable that a transgendered person could choose the bathroom that matched his/her/its gender feelings.
It could have been the stress of having to think on my feet, because upon calm reflection later several points came to mind:
- sexually abused women could suffer flash back emotional trauma when confronted by a biological male transgendered into a woman
- young girls could be prey for a sexual aggressor
- privacy issues
The point was I felt unprepared in our conversation.
My dream last night underscored the same feeling.
However, I did experience one positive, but unexpected conversation earlier in the week. A school colleague (not the same one as in Boston) answered my question about a planned faculty female trip to Washington, DC. She explained that it was to attend a rally supporting women’s rights. We got talking about abortion. I HAD done enough study in pro-life tactics to know the pivotal issue:
- What is the fetus?
If it is NOT a human life, then the woman carrying it has every right to dispose of it as she sees fit.
But if it IS a human life, then that unborn child has the right to life.
We had a civil exchange and left it like this:
- I place the rights of the unborn baby over the rights of the woman
- She places the rights of the woman over the right to life of the child
Although I’m pleased that I could at least make a partial case for why destroying a life is murder, I want to be better prepared for the next conversation.
And last night’s dream has motivated me to know and be able to articulate WHY I believe what I do across many issues.
Logical Janes and Joes must do their homework in order to be a force for clear thinking and moral logic!
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