Free your mind, and the rest will follow

I’m embarrassed to realize that I left out print media yesterday. (I am also embarrassed that in an earlier post I referred to Bachmann as O’Donnell. I know they’re not the same person. I just find certain similarities.)

Anyway, the omission is not a slam on newspapers in any way. I will hang on to my paper as long as I can. However, for me that is basically the Oregonian. I sometimes grab the Willamette Week or the Portland Tribune if there is a headline that grabs me, but I don’t read any papers on the national scene (unlike Sarah Palin, who reads all of them). I can’t get behind the Wall Street Journal at all. Sometimes I end up reading things from the Post or the Times online, but I don’t make any concerted effort to do so, and I am not really into any of the news magazines.

I will say, though, that I appreciate the calmer tone that comes with print. There is a certain amount of remove that seems to lend itself towards being a little more neutral and less casual. Plus, the letters to the editor section has its ups and downs, but it will never make you weep for humanity the way web comments do.

So, back to things to help you break out of a limited viewpoint. Speaking of bias, my list is pretty much things that I do or have done. I don’t mean to be an egomaniac, but I think it helps illustrate my point. Our thinking is geared towards things in our experience. There are probably things that are really good that can’t come to mind because I have never done them, but these are things that I have done that I think have helped.

Recently I posted about my mission, and that was huge for me. It was also very much a religious thing, which worked for me, but not everyone would want that. I imagine that serving in the Peace Corps or studying abroad would be somewhat similar.

Those are all big time commitments of course, and not open to everyone. Also, they won’t necessarily work. I had a schoolmate who was an exchange student to South Africa and came away convinced that Apartheid was necessary, and that we only got very biased reporting on it here or we would understand. That disturbed me. We weren’t really close enough for me to ask him if he has changed his mind since the end of it did not result in wholesale slaughter of the whites, but maybe. I hope so.

Not everyone can take months to years off to spend abroad, but you can often manage a few weeks, and it is enlightening. When we were in Australia we talked to Australians, but we also talked to Scots, French, Japanese, Belgians, Germans, and Irish. I think there was a family from Hong Kong in one of the groups. So there are those conversations, but there is also watching the television, both the commercials and the shows, and there is shopping in the stores, wandering the streets, and absorbing the atmosphere.

Something that can make travel easier is learning another language, another great way to open your mind. Remember when I was blogging about writing to my family in Italy, and how hard it was to just switch my mind back into Italian? It’s not just the words, but there is a mindset that develops with the language, and you get to understand that better. Actually, studying other languages improved my English as well. The only reason I can use “who” and “whom” correctly is because it clicked in when I was studying “qui” and “que” for French. (The correct use doesn’t always sound right, because of how other people use it, but at least I know.) And of course, studying Spanish is why I was watching Univision.

So now that we have covered my first major in college, let’s get to the second major! I think another great way is studying history. One thing I like about history is that you learn so much about everything else, because geographical terrain and political trends and human psychology and any other discipline you could imagine will pop up at times. The underlying result of that is that you see how it keeps repeating, and you see how we are the same. When you can read something from the 4th century BC, and relate to that person over time and space, how can you not relate to someone in your own time and country?

It’s not that you don’t find anything disturbing about your fellow man when you do this—you totally do—but you find good things too, and are reminded of your own humanity. I’m always going to think that’s important.