Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Critical thinking is at an all-time low.

Do you believe that? I just made it up.

But it feels true. Especially after this week.

This week I’ve seen a rash of posts, all expounding strongly worded views with the utmost confidence. Here! See this picture/statistic? This is what it means to you! Aren’t you outraged?

Sources for these have been other bloggers, online journalism, and internet memes, and in each case the material has been misconstrued, taken out of context, hyped for the sake of a headline, or just plain fabricated.

Why does this rile me up? Because I was taught to think for myself.

I was taught to think, not to take it all on faith. I was taught that the phrase “No aspirin is stronger than Bayer,” doesn’t mean that Bayer is the strongest; it means that there are others that are just as strong as Bayer.

I don’t know if my upbringing was unusual, or we stopped teaching this to our kids, but either way, it made for a maddening week. And it’s only Thursday.

Sound-bite mentality

Yesterday, I posted a response to one such item: a Stephen King quote taken out of context and turned into an internet meme for writers. Modern society’s love affair with the sound bite means we never get the whole story. More than that, it means we no longer care about the whole story. What that leads to is the mindset wherein we don’t even realize that there’s more to the story. We see meme, we hear the sound bite, and we think “Ah…easy…That’s all I need to know.”

And we swallow it whole.

Sheer bunkum

Earlier this week, I saw a post that asserted a haphazard, incomprehensible, ergo propter hoc connection between these disparate “facts”:

• The 11 states where there are more people on welfare than people working for a living all have Democratic governors.
• The United Nations International Health Organization, in an article with Business Investor’s Daily, stated that America led England and Canada in a number of “access to care” factors.
• The Cabinet of the Obama Administration has the lowest percentage of members who had participated in private sector business, lower than all Cabinets going back to Teddy Roosevelt.

This pachinko ball progression was somehow intended to blame all our country’s ills on the Democratic Party and the current administration.

Within two minutes, I found a fact-check article that completely debunked the first item, as it double- and triple-counts people on various government programs and missed three Republican governors. I then found that there is no such entity as the United Nations International Health Organization, and (even assuming the authors meant the World Health Organization) there’s no record of either having given an interview/statistics to the Business Investor’s Daily. As to the third assertion, anyone with a smidgen of knowledge about American financial history will know that the Great Depression, the S&L crash, and our current Great Recession all began under administrations that had (according to this post) Cabinets with a much greater number of businessmen, and little fact-checking quickly found that even this item was false.

And yet, off it went, this internet post, from person to person, festooned with comments like “Yeah!” and “Bingo!” and other, more tumescent accolades.

Just because you like the bunkum you read, that doesn’t make it true.

Journalistic hype

Finally, today, I saw an article with the headline: Harvard Scientists Urge You to Stop Drinking Milk. The article began with the statement “Harvard researcher and pediatrician argues that conventional milk and  dairy products alike are a detriment to your health…” [bold/emphasis is theirs, not mine]. The article goes on to imply that encouraging our children to drink 3 glasses of milk a day is a contributor to our nation’s obesity.

Think about that for a second and you’ll see that it’s poppycock. Americans have been encouraged to drink lots of milk for as long as I’ve been alive, which considerably pre-dates America’s current problem with obesity. My two brothers and I, together, consumed a gallon of milk each day, and we were thin as reeds in our youth. Of course, I also walked the hills and rode my bike, while my kid brothers had soccer and peewee baseball. We played in the street and in the schoolyard. We were active. We didn’t sit with our smart phones and video games. We ran, jumped, climbed, swam, and played.

Well, it didn’t take long for me to find, tucked down in the bottom of the article, the fact that the “journalistic” article buried: the source article was mostly decrying the use of added sugars in milk drinks, like chocolate milk. I don’t know about you, but I was never encouraged to drink 3 glasses of chocolate milk per day. Sure, I would have, but since my parents did not give me that choice, I didn’t.

Drinking milk is not a major contributor to America’s obesity. It’s our inactivity combined with our increased caloric intake. We put sugar in everything: peanut butter, flavored yogurts, so-called “healthy” cereals, soft drinks, and yes, chocolate milk. We also regularly serve side dishes with more calories than we need in the entire meal. We super-size and over-sweeten every aspect of our daily diet.

More to the point, most milk in America comes fortified with vitamins A and D, which contribute to bone growth in children and help decrease osteoporosis in seniors. Sure, you can get vitamin D from exposure to the sun, but in this age of SPF-2000 sunscreens and kids who’s only exposure to light comes from the plasma screen attached to their Xbox, do you really think they get enough sunlight to achieve their RDA?

Are there things in milk we should avoid? Yes. We can avoid milk that’s ultra-pasteurized and that has added antibiotics. For a few cents more per gallon, I get milk with no additives (except vitamins A and D) and it comes straight from a local dairy, not from two states away.

A parting gift

I’ve rattled on for quite a while here, and far exceeded the time allotted in both my day and (assuming you’re still reading this) yours. So, by way of recompense, let me give you this, a little sound bite to take with you.

Take the time to question. Take the time to think. Take the time to know.

k