About the Presidential Debates

About the presidential debates…

My first thought is that everyone should watch for themselves and not rely on their news outlets to tell them how it went. Always better to get your information first hand so you can make your own judgment.

Second thought: Expecting a certain outcome or looking for a certain outcome predisposes a person to only see things that support their existing beliefs. It’s called “Confirmation Bias.” With Confirmation Bias, we not only see what supports our view, but things that are different from our expectations don’t even register. So, this second thought is to go into the debate with a balanced mind about it. No matter who you support and no matter how strongly you support them, what you really need to know is, objectively, what were the good points each candidate made, what points did they fumble, and overall, who had the stronger arguments about the direction the nation should go.

One of these men is going to be our next president. Our future will be guided by the plan they lay out, the priorities they have, the attitudes they express as their version of the American Ideal.

Whether your guy wins or loses in the election, this is perhaps your best opportunity to do a service to yourself and for your family by seeing the two paths we might be taking for the next four years so you can be prepared and make the best choices for your household.

The debate isn’t a sporting event where you are a fan, shout your lungs out, and go away angry or ecstatic when your candidate loses or wins in November, though many treat it that way. What it really is, is a forum where two visions of the future are compared, where the ideas each vision contains are weighed against each other, and where the kind of world we’ll live in for the next four years might very well be determined.

Wouldn’t it be great if rather than rejecting out-of-hand anything the “other” guy says, we were able to find the good ideas hiding in their rhetoric, the poor ideas in our own candidate’s spiel, and use that opportunity to incorporate those good ideas in our own platform and strengthen it further by removing ideas from our platform that the debate showed where not the best on the table.

In the end, this approach brings us closer together and helps unit us as Americans since, after all, neither party wants to bring down America, though each party will tell you the other party wants to do that.

We all grew up here, share the same celebrations and holidays, enjoy our families and friends, worship in the manner of our choice, or not at all if we so choose.

Both parties have lost as many soldiers protecting our freedom and our constitution. As many from each party died on 911 or from Covid as from the other party.

We all want what’s best for America. We are all patriots and feel it with a passion – except, of course, those who want the country to be run the way their party believes, with the other half of all Americans locked out of having any part of the country they love, or even having any voice or any say.

We are Americans. We favor different candidates. But we owe it to ourselves to see the good in the other side and the bad in our own. For if we don’t, we’ve proven we really aren’t Americans after all: we’re just in it for ourselves.