Hey look, the world’s passing by and we’re missing it

Here’s an idea: Let’s all agree to stop getting our news exclusively from political commentators on 24-hour cable news.

I’m not saying you can’t tune in to get their take on a given issue, but political commentary is not entirely news. It’s the opinion of someone with a political agenda, a point of view, a primary bias and a secondary motivation to fill your head with things that may not even be true.

One of my favorite examples is the commentator who once suggested that there were poor people trying to sign up for the Affordable Care Act while waiting for an ambulance during a medical emergency. The commentator claimed these people kept hitting the “refresh” button on the Obamacare sign-up page so they could get the ambulance to come.

If you believe something like that, you’re what they call a “low-information voter.”

(Actually, if you believe that, you’re an idiot.)

The reason they refer to some people as low information voters is because they are. Too many people have stopped thinking for themselves and started allowing ideologues and spinmeisters to do their thinking for them.

“Just give me the talking points so I don’t have to read. Tell me what you think I need to know.”

Thanks to the Internet, there is more information available to people today than ever before, but that’s both a blessing and a curse, as we learned when a gunman went into a Washington pizza joint to kill people because of a fake news story about Hillary Clinton.

In order to use the Internet intelligently, you have to sort through the opinion and philosophy, drive around all of the fake news and propaganda sites and actually dig down deep enough to find the actual facts. Even then, you sometimes have to use your instincts and your common sense to decide if something is true.

And pay attention to dates. I see stuff all the time that is a year or two old and gets regurgitated because someone didn’t check the publication date.

I don’t know the exact date when we stopped thinking for ourselves or making reasoned decisions based on fact, or when being intelligent became a bad thing, but I know that it did and it’s one of the reasons for much of the decline in this country. No one can expect voters to make educated choices if half of the people refuse to educate themselves.