Final Essay-Sam always finishes first and how he intends to change the world.

As always, society is not perfect, with its flaws and gapping wounds that demand to be filled. What cause am I willing to champion, what injustice must be changed? Of all the causes I could think of my final choice is atheism, but more importantly the spread of reason. The best way to think of my goal is that you hold your statements and thoughts to the same standards as you hold against others when you are tying to determine if they are true. I want to be able to think for themselves, to be able to question things they assume to be true. Atheism is the easiest was to do this and the best example; it is rare to find a cause that its opponent have no good reasons. Where else can both sides fight the good fight with absolute conviction the opposing, side is wrong and absolutely no grounds for compromise. However, there are others doing these things so I will concentrate on something else, something political. I will try to get politicians to not only speak the truth, but also admit to what is unsaid.
It is not a goal that easily to accomplish. Although protesting for a specific idea or plan of action is easy to imagine, how do you get people to admit that they are hiding something? How do you change “the system”? Why do I continue to write about things like this instead of focusing on peace, or equality, or abortion? The reason is simple; there are so many other people involved in those areas that I would change the balance one way or another if I joined a side. I pick a battle I can fight, not alone, but in such a way as to make a difference. In addition, hanging around politicians provides a lot more air conditioning then protesting in the streets.
Getting people to admit that they are hiding things is hard to do. You might not know what I am talking about if you do not pay attention. What I mean is whenever Bush gives a speech he says “the war in Iraq”, not “the war I started and never could explain”. If politicians were more honest, things might not be better, but they would be clearer. So how do you get people to speak clearer? You work on the media. It reports what politicians say and its spin, whether, slavishly subservient or sarcastically mocking, influences how people see candidates for office. If lying gets them mocked and makes their position indefensible then they will stop doing it in, or at least in ways which they can’t be caught. So getting reporters to be less “fair, balanced, and partisan” would be a good way to go. However the reason that reporters don’t do things controversial, like constantly second guessing political decisions (In today’s news politicians raised the minimum wage yet again. When asked if they were ever planning to tie the rates to inflation they were aghast. “How will we get the base motivated?”) is that it is just not done. Their purpose is to raise stock prices by getting viewers to watch. So we keep on jumping from problem to problem. Fortunately, this one link can be changed. If you own a news station, you can control its content. Money is power in today’s society and while mass action may work for other people, I think that this is more effective. The peace marches of the 60s and 70s have not prevented our nation from going to war almost immediately after Vietnam, the teaching of evolution has had to fight a continuous struggle for the last fifty years, in order to be taught and the pendulum on abortion seems to be swinging back towards criminalization after 30 years of fighting. Each cause has millions on both sides, fighting to sculpt language and ideas in order that they may prevail. I want to be able to fight a winnable battle. Although I do not think independent media will exist for posterity, I do believe it will introduce doubt and make people think. Why fight countless battles against people who will oppose you tooth and nail, when it is so much easier just to change one thing and roll up all the conflicts simultaneously. Although war is weakly based on religion (more often on nationalism), abortion and evolution are usually against opponents fighting on religious grounds, who have shut down their minds (how should we punish those who break the law? How shall we deal with doctors who fail because we refused to let them understand?). I know that reason is the most corrosive counter to faith and it is an even better counter toward other forms of credulity, hopefully blunting peoples gullibility to the sort of promises politicians routinely proffer. Of course, buying a media outlet and using it to express your views is hard going, but Rupert Murdoch has shown it can be done and used to advance a worthy cause: himself. I simply aim significantly lower because I have no idea how hard it is and I wish to aim for what is possible. Protesting will not change the world because it is easy to simply ignore or quash, but using a system against itself is much more satisfying and more effective because a system cannot question its own parts and working. Getting people to think, to question and to doubt is the only way change can happen. Protest can make people realize people just like them endorse it or by change to get to realize the difference is not so bad. However, for objections that are grounded in neither logic nor morality, but faith neither change can work because a person with faith can simply refuse to believe you. You must help them change their minds before you can change their opinions and their politics. Telling someone who mindless supports and idea logical reasons they are wrong is like nailing Jell-O to a wall. There is not any point. You have to solidify that Jell-O and get them to think using reason; it isn’t enough to get them to agree with you, they must understand why and they must know if what they are agreeing to is right or wrong, not because they are told to, but because they are wrong. Already there are shows and sites that illustrate what is wrong with politics, but in general they lean to the left or extremely humorous. I want to start a source that people agree with, that gets them to use logic to support ideas they agree with, but that ends up using that logic for other uses. When they here other arguments using the same logic, I don’t want them to think “I don’t agree, it must be wrong”, but rather “wait, that is what I would say, maybe they are right…” It is a great goal to get people to agree with you on an issue, but it is an even better one to have them come to the same conclusion independently (It shows you didn’t screw up in your reasoning). In the mean time I will try more humble approaches, because teaching people how to think is infinitely better then teaching them what to think.