Day 8: Open Your Mind: Read Something by Someone You Disagree With
For today’s challenge – read something by someone you disagree with – AND find something in their position that you do agree with – I will visit the NY Times, a publication I read weekly in college, but recently have avoided like the plague. I know that I will instantly find plenty I disagree with – starting with editorialized headlines – so the real challenge for me is – can I find a nugget of truth? Can I find something I agree with? Challenge accepted; let’s take a look.
Today, over on the NYTimes Opinion page is an article by by an author who I find dishonest, inflammatory, and supercilious – Jamelle Bouie. I am committing to reading this article and sharing something within it that I do agree with before reading the article to really force me to embrace this exercise 🙂 The article it titled The Trump We Did Not Want to See. I’ll read it and return here momentarily…
Wow, that article made my blood boil. It was a piece fitting of Bouie. Full of big adjectives, overflowing with acrimony. I felt as though it was written with his nose in the air and face turned from his keyboard in disgust at himself for writing such a tired and angry hit piece. I find it endlessly amusing that the elite writers of the Times don’t understand Trump and think so little of him. I wonder if they have read Atlas Shrugged and realize that he is much more like Hank Rearden and they, the Bouies of the world, are present-day Bernard Scudders, writing smut to win favors of their friends, not to bring truth to the world.
Here’s the one line in the piece that I do agree with: “our political class is this Lovecraftian protagonist, struggling to understand an incomprehensibly abnormal president.” However, I would add Bouie to the political class he writes about. He – and the political class – do not understand the president, but it is because they do not want to understand the president. They have shown no curiosity about him; just disdain. For most people, he is easy to understand – he doesn’t like to be mocked, he likes to win, he craves praise and attention, he loves America, and, yes, he can’t stop Tweeting. I agree with Bouie that Trump is abnormal, I just might use a synonym – exceptional.