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Drawing circles.

July 23rd, 2008

I caught Sunday’s Meet the Press with Al Gore and thought I should look at what he said up against last season’s draft recommendations on “America’s Energy Future.” While googling the transcript, I found the transcript AND MORE.

Here are three reviews of the interview:

Take 1: “Watching this pompous windbag - who produces CARBON Dioxide - makes me want to poke my eyes out. It would be less painful. What a self-righteous hypocrite!”

Take 2: “Somewhere in the darkest recesses of the RNC (or from Norquist’s or Rove’s office, your pick) the fax machine was working over time making sure that Tom Brokaw had the latest GOP talking points to discredit Al Gore for his appearance on Meet the Press.”

Take 3: “… for a change, we got a TV talk show for grown-ups, where a burning issue of our time was discussed without a single gotcha moment.”

Hard to believe they all watched the same interview.

That got me thinking that the way we human beings choose and process information we use… it’s like drawing circles around the particulars of a situation we choose to assimilate. A conservative who doesn’t believe in man-made climate change picks out the parts of the interview that fall in his circle of concern, the liberal sees a whole different picture in the inkblot.

Of course, that’s simply human. Where the whole mess starts to get buggy is when we refuse to step outside of our circles, when we only listen to people inside our circles, and when we twist facts to shoehorn things into our circles that simply don’t belong there.

So, yeah… draw those circles, but I challenge you to be prepared to step outside of them. Or, better still, I challenge you to enlarge them.

Who knows what you might stumble over in the process.

Entry Filed under: Village Square 101, Energy & Environment