So many people were stunned when he became President.  How did this happen?  How did we not see this coming?  Consider that, in this age of hundreds of television and radio channels, magazines, newspapers, and other news sources, many of us see and hear only the ones that validate or support our own points of view.  By having so many choices, we can choose to not see or hear the other side of the story.  Recently in the Times Sunday Magazine, one writer suggested that social media is helping us become more polarized by filtering our messages.

“We’ve heard about the power of social media to help us empathize with others.  But what if, instead, it’s just cocooning us with our friends?”

“Each time I liked an article, or clicked on a link, or hid another, the algorithms that curate my streams took notice and showed me only what they thought I wanted to see.”

“Everything I could want to see is available at my fingertips, and yet I didn’t look.”

“The…new messaging features work to bind private groups tighter together, by making it more fun to talk to one another than to engage with the world at large.”

“Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don’t agree with.”

The wonderful and lost art of debate taught us to study both sides of an argument to the point that we could effectively argue either side.  (Oh please see “The Great Debaters” with Denzel Washington.)  Debate taught us that we could not defeat what we do not understand.  Trump and his ilk walked away with this election because we could not imagine that a rational argument could be made for supporting him.  We couldn’t imagine it, so we didn’t look for it.  “Everything I could want to see is available at my fingertips, and yet I didn’t look.”

Another article that challenges what is difficult to imagine appeared on the front page of the Sunday Times Style section.

What Is the Color of Beauty?

“…Ghana’s new ban against certain skin-bleaching creams was unlikely to work…”

“…they are flooded with messages – and not even subliminal ones – that tell them that white is beautiful.”

Sad, right?  There was more to this article, but nothing new.  There is a case for understanding how American Blacks were bamboozled.  We took in the theory of white superiority with mother’s milk and were stripped of any alternative theory.  No other culture, language, religion or standard of beauty was allowed in this land of the free.  But how has this claptrap message been accepted internationally?  Has it all been money, media and power? Or maybe the message hasn’t been accepted.  Maybe the folks bleaching their skin are just the ones that made the news – like drug dealers in South America or gang members in Harlem – creating the perception that all Africans want to be white, all South Americans are criminals, and all of Harlem’s young people are in gangs.

I tell you, truth is seldom the first thing you see or hear.  If you want it, you have to work for it.  If you don’t work for it, your name is Complacent and your president's name is Donald Trump.