What trend could I be talking about? Paranoia.
It seems to gain particular clarity during election season. People often complain about politicians, and how each one is a crook, and that it is widely known that politicians will say anything and do anything to get elected. That is, essentially, the truth.
Yet, each political season, we here lies upon lies, mounted one on top of the other. You might think that, by now, we could easily see through this, and call a spade a spade.
But you would be wrong.
Politicians tell people what they want to hear, and the people listen. They might gripe and complain, and many even mention how little regard they hold for this or that individual politician, or politicians in general.
Yet, they listen. They absorb. And ultimately, they believe.
In the news now, and guaranteed soon to be more prominent, are allegations of voter fraud. Listening to self-serving politicians (usually, the ones who lost an election), there is rampant voter fraud across the land, and if you listen to them without checking the facts, you might just get the impression that these incidents number in the millions, and greatly alter the election.
When you take a closer look, however, you see that the numbers simply do not add up. Voting fraud is a huge crime, and the punishment is enormous - enough for most people to be scared away. The Justice Department conducted a five year search into this issue, and found that there was hardly anything to the claims of widespread and endemic voter fraud.
The numbers? As of 2007, there had been 120 people charged of the crime, and 86 convicted. 86 is hardly a national emergency that will likely swing an election - particularly on the national level. It might be a problem, to be sure. But it does not warrant the finger pointing and accusations that it seems to garner. Simply stated, it just is not that big of an issue. Here is the link to the article about the study from the Justice Department:
So, all of that talk about how imperative it is to get photo id for each and every voter, to guard against voter fraud. Most of it is blowing steam and making mountains out of molehills. It will prevent legitimate voters from voting, because 11% of the nation's eligible voters do not have photo id's, mostly for financial reasons, or the inability and lack of desiring to drive, or for other reasons. It is these people that will be hurt, and not allowed to vote - which some of the more cynical among us would suggest is the real intention of hyping up this "huge" problem that isn't. Here is an article suggesting that the "necessity" of photo identification in order to vote really is not necessary:
Another issue that receives a lot of attention and gets myths going more than most is the issue of immigration. Many Americans truly believe that the country's problems can be laid at the feet of immigrants, or especially of illegal immigrants. There is even a term that has come to be popularly used, "illegals".
The problem is that most of the information is patently false and misleading. Every society seems to need a scapegoat, and here in the United States, where we have a history of scapegoating as extensive as anyone else (more extensive, in many cases -from natives to blacks during slavery to people who did not own property getting the vote, to women, to the Japanese who had their lives interrupted and were sent to internment camps, to Arabs and Muslims these days (they are not one and the same, you know) and now, to so-called "illegals"), the latest argument of the moment that conveniently blames a relatively powerless minority for a huge chunk of the nation's problems winds up being illegal immigrants.
The fact of the matter is that most illegal immigrants find work that most Americans themselves simply would not do. Jobs like scrubbing toilets or picking pesticide-laden fruits and vegetables for virtual slave wages simply does not constitute stealing jobs. It seems like just another popular ploy to blame "the other" for problems that, in fact, are much more extensive, complicated, and involved, and usually not nearly so transparent as most people would like to believe.
There are other scapegoats, as well. Gays, presently, are a good example. They cannot gain equal rights like the rest of us simply because to do so, according to popular belief, would be the downfall of the very institution of marriage. Of course, there are no statistics to back this up, but that does not stop this popularly held belief.
Paranoia seems to be everywhere. For example, it is now almost Halloween, yet going trick or treating seems to be a tradition that is in serious danger of being lost. People are afraid: there seems to be a belief that you can trust nobody that you don't know (and quite a few people that you do know) because there seem to be truly bad people everywhere. Perverts and sex offenders, murderers and rapists, thieves, and so on and so forth.
Yet, reports of actual incidents during Halloween, like the needle in an apple, or candy on a hot pan, really don't have any credence to them. They are not real. Just because a majority of people seem to believe that they are does not make it so.
We seem to give in to our worst instincts entirely too often, and in the United States, this disturbing trend seems to be on the rise ever since the "Me Decade" of the eighties. We give in to our fears, and the facts begin to matter less and less. So long as someone says it convincingly enough, and seems to open our eyes to this problem, then the rest doesn't matter. So easy was it to fool Americans in recent times, that we fought a costly war for nothing more than a lie: that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD's). Remember them? We all know how well that turned out, right?
Still, Americans have not been dissuaded enough. they still believe what they want to believe, as opposed to what actually is reality. It is a very alarming trend, to be sure, and also one that might lead to further tragedy in the future. Perhaps it will change, and we will avoid such a fate. Yet, given the stubbornness with which people tend to hold these beliefs, it hardly seems realistic to imagine that people will, in fact, learn this lesson of not giving into their worst instincts in time to avoid a true disaster - and one of their very own making!
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