Learning to think for ourselves...

The Tucson tragedy has shown to those who sincerely wanted to see it, the corrosive effect of negative political chatter and invectives. Yet, it's a lot easier to listen to pre-digested opinions that to build our own views from scratch, based on what we like, what we feel and what genuinely make sense to us. We simply don't seem to have time to arrive at that level of understanding in the busy world we live in and are showered by a constant bombardment of all kinds of information, true, exaggerated and false.

Anytime we hear, see or read about something, we really need to put our critical thinking cap on and make the effort to find out how that news information stacks up with what we know and who we are, and only then, draw our own conclusions. Of course to accomplish that more easily, it helps a great deal to already know who we are ...