A Well Informed Electorate

“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government;… whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” –Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was far from a perfect person, but he was definitely a wise one. He understood that if people understood the issues, they would take the right course more often than not. And yet, we find ourselves, as a nation, taking on more and more tyranny willingly. How could that be? Well, it seems clear that the electorate isn’t very well informed, doesn’t it?

Our mainstream media sources don’t really do a very good job of informing the electorate. In a handful of words, they try and lay out both sides of an issue while at the same time using descriptive adjectives in an effort to make their writing better, but oblivious to how clear it makes their own personal preferences. However, as these are supposedly unbiased news sources, the masses take it as a fact…including the slant.

Keep in mind that this slant is often unintentional, but inevitable. Bias is a natural human condition after all.

The thing is, how do we inform a populace that thinks they already are informed? Well, it won’t be easy. We don’t have the huge media outlets that NBC or CNN has. We don’t have talk radio pretty much locked up either. We will never have the internet cornered, and that’s fine. But we can win hearts and minds up close and personal.

Most people want a free society, especially here in western cultures. Most think we actually have one. If we, just regular folks like you and me, can show people who little freedom we actually have, we can start changing minds. The idea of broad, sweeping change happening overnight is, at best, naive. Instead, we will have to slog through years of shifting public opinion.

However, just telling people they’re not free won’t work. They’ve been indoctrinated to believe that they are, so you had better have your facts straight. Be ready to show them the abuses of freedom in the Patriot Act. Be ready to show how taxation is essentially robbery. How we work for several months each year essentially for free…making us slaves to the government.

Once you start to win their minds, you’ll have to dig deeper. Show them the abuses that aren’t so obviously. Dig deeper. You know your circle of friends better than I do, so you’ll know better than I what is most likely to sway their opinions.

There will be obstacles. It won’t be easy. But it’s necessary. Without changing hearts and minds, our nation will descend further and further into tyranny until before long, the land of the free and home of the brave will be nothing more than an outmoded idea that fits best at the end of a song, rather than our day to day lives.