What EVERYONE Knows

I heard the odious phrase again today… “Well, everyone knows…”

No. Everyone doesn’t know. ANYTHING.

Another one is “Of course, everyone agrees…”

What the meaning of these two phrases are is that if YOU don’t know, or if YOU don’t agree, then you’re obviously the only one and there’s no point in paying you any credence.

This kind of goes back to Sarah Palin’s “real America” bullcrap during the last presidential election. The people in the heartland, the so-called “real” America, consider what they believe to be correct, and everything else to be incorrect. But this is not because that belief is RIGHT, it is because it is all that they know. For instance, the claim is that there are no homoamorous people in the heartland, or very, very few. This is not because there are any less homoamorous people in the heartland, simply that they are less open about it and more spread out. I believe that the statistics say that 30% of Americans are homoamorous. (I have taken to using the terms “homoamorous” and “heteroamorous” because these designations are about love and comfort, not strictly sex.) So if you take, for instance, San Francisco with its roughly 800,000 people, you have roughly 240,000 homosexuals statistically. If, on the other hand, you look at Ames, Iowa with its population of about 50,000, you are stuck with a mere 15,000 homosexuals. And you can bet that none of them are participating in what passes for a “gay pride” parade in Ames. They’re all hiding in their little closets, beating off to gay porn, thanking God for the internet so that they don’t have to risk mail-order. And some of these people have their sexuality so deeply buried that even THEY don’t know that they’re gay. All that they know is that things don’t function as well with their opposite-sex partner as they should, and they usually feel immensely guilty about it.

You can correlate that to drugs, as well. Everyone knows that there are more drug addicts in cities than in small towns, right? I would say that there are as many POTENTIAL drug addicts in small town middle America as there are in Los Angeles, Seattle or New York. But most of these middle American drug addicts have to be satisfied with beer or the skunk-weed that their buddy grows in his basement, because if they want to get meth or coke or something more serious, they have to DRIVE somewhere to get it. That’s right, I believe that the difference between the drug problems in urban areas and the drug problems in rural areas is largely a matter of availability. If you walk down the street in Seattle and don’t look like a straight-edger or a cop, you’re going to have eight people offer you crystal meth. It’s supply and demand, folks. If that same meth dealer were to travel to Lenexa, Kansas he’d probably have to wait three hours in between viable customers instead of three minutes. It’s just not financially feasible.

And, of course, EVERYONE KNOWS that in a small town you can leave your door unlocked, right? Right. Because a random stranger trying doorknobs is going to stick out like a sore thumb in a small town. In a big city, that random stranger is one of hundreds or thousands that you see everyday.

What I’m trying to say here is that “common knowledge” doesn’t really exist. It was, for instance, common knowledge less than a hundred years ago that black people are intellectually inferior to white people, period. If George W. Bush and Barack Obama don’t conclusively disprove that, then I don’t know what will. It was common knowledge a hundred years before that that women were nothing more than receptacles in the reproductive process. Go back a few hundred years before that, and it was common knowledge that the Earth revolved around the sun. It was also common knowledge at about that time that for a man to have sex with another man was nothing more than a viable alternative to having sex with a woman and running the risk of getting her pregnant or catching VD. See how our “common knowledge” and views of things change?

The same thing applies to polls. I always have to grit my teeth, for instance, when a Fox News poll claims that “Forty percent of AMERICANS” whatever. What they mean is “Forty percent of Fox viewers” whatever. Same with CNN. And then you have to add the codicil “… that answer surveys” on to that. There’s a large percentage of Americans out there who would NEVER answer a survey. Me, personally, if I’m asked to answer a survey and it will take less than fifteen minutes, I’m all over it. But to (I would say) many to most Americans, this is nothing more or less than a waste of their valuable time. So do yourself a favor… next time that you hear a statistic on, say, CNN that is based on a survey, add the phrase “…percent of CNN viewers who will answer surveys” to the end of it, and I think that you’ll see that the statistic isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.

So, instead of basing what you know on “common knowledge” or what “everyone knows”, why don’t you try learning as much as you can on the subject and knowing what YOU know instead?

Peace.

Randal