Make it your New Year’s resolution to avoid extremism, in any area.
Think for yourself. Question blanket statements. Don’t allow your emotions to ratchet up to a point where you take your rational brain out of the equation.
It’s a natural tendency for people and events to be skewed in one direction or another. Think of the pendulum that spends precious little time at the point of equilibrium.
But, unlike a pendulum which is hostage to physics, you have the opportunity to correct for distortions.
Events of recent days have brought this subject into focus.
We’ve had at least two terrorist incidents, both of which are reported to have been fomented by veterans of the U.S. Army.
We owe a great debt to our servicemen. There have been many in my family, including my late father. The vast majority of veterans were or are good people. But we also owe it to society to admit that not all veterans are beyond reproach simply because they once wore the uniform.
Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols both had military backgrounds. I was recently reminded of a tragic story, reported by many outlets including The Guardian in a Sept. 8, 2010 post, about 12 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan killing civilians at random and cutting off their fingers to keep as souvenirs.
Extreme actions in general are relayed to us almost daily.
An assassin executes an executive of a health care provider on a Manhattan street and people take to social media to praise him as some sort of hero, even raising money for his legal defense.
We just had a presidential election in which Democrats labeled the opposing voters as garbage, deplorables, racists, idiots and various other uncomplimentary terms.
There are extremists on the right, too, but the political left seems more eager to attract and endorse such lunacy.
Few are nuttier than climate change crusaders who are long on predictions and short on accountability when those predictions are 100 percent wrong. Al Gore has made a fortune off the “cause” and, along with fellow climate extremists, has proclaimed, among other things, extreme rises in ocean levels due to melting and snow and ice.
The Arctic, in particular, was predicted to be ice-free by 2013. Instead, the most recent survey finds there is 26 percent more Arctic ice than there was in 2012.
Climate alarmists are willing to starve people by banning carbon fuels used to run farming machinery, or banning cows due to them farting.
The most extreme views have taken over the movement, sort of like the Democratic Party. If the climate activists did have a point to make, it’s lost in their hyperbole.
Ironically, terrorists in the New Orleans and Las Vegas examples would be celebrated as being environmetally friendly due to them using electric vehicles for their mayhem.
One of the basic tenets decades back, when I was being taught traditional journalism, was to avoid the use of absolute statements such as no one does this, or everyone does that.
To refute such exaggeration, all someone would need to do is find just one person who didn’t follow the rule. It was an important point.
Such lessons in moderation would be particularly timely now. Unfortunately, they would be largely ignored.
Sam Ross Jr's site 