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Voices From the Crowd: Becoming an Informed Voter
By Miles Wickstrom
2012
15
I have some bad news and some
worse news. Which would you like
first? The bad news: 2012 is an election
year. The worse news: a veritable
tsunami of campaign advertisements is
heading our way. Very little of what we
hear in those ads will be true. We will
hear claims made without substantiation,
conclusions reached using faulty data,
and assumptions based upon fallacious
reasoning. So here’s my version of a
public service message. You are about
to learn the four key steps to becoming
an informed voter. Practice this simple
four-step process and you will be able to
identify what is fact and what is fertilizer.
The first step to becoming an
informed voter is to gather information
from multiple sources with multiple
perspectives. If you wanted to learn
more about an environmental issue
and the only sources you went to were
Earth First, Greenpeace and the Friends
of Whales, is it possible to end up
with a rather skewed point of view?
You bet. However, if you blended in
some information from the Wall Street
Journal, Science Magazine and the
Christian Science Monitor, you are
much more likely to produce a balanced
collection of data from which a reasoned
conclusion could be drawn.
Finding reliable media sources
is a tricky proposition in itself. The
days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter
Cronkite are gone. Television news
anchors today are not journalists.
They are entertainers. Their success is
measured by their ratings, not by their
journalistic accuracy.
Which is a good segue to the
second key step which is to question
the source of the information. Did
you ever see the movie “Thank You
For Smoking”? It is a satire about a
spokesman for the tobacco industry who
travels to schools and town hall meetings
with graphs and charts and stacks of
data that prove – prove – that smoking
not only is not harmful, it’s actually
beneficial.
Guess where all his information
came from? Sure, the tobacco lobby.
Again, the movie was a spoof, but it
was exactly on target. We are inundated
every day with outrageous claims that
are made with a straight face. The secret
to becoming an informed voter is to find
out who is making the claim and if they
– like the protagonist in “Thank You For
Smoking” – have a dog in the fight.
Willie Brown, the former mayor
of San Francisco, probably said it best:
in politics, a lie that goes unchallenged
becomes the truth within 24 hours.
The third step is to question our
own biases. The trouble with bias is
that we have already formed an answer
before anyone’s even bothered to ask
a question. One bias many of us share
is a bias towards quick fix solutions,
or what Madison Avenue calls “instant
gratification”.
If you drove to Barnes and
Noble, you could easily find at least half
a dozen diet books that claim you can
eat all you want and still lose weight.
Absurd, yes, but they sell. Let’s connect
a few dots. If millions of people buy
diet books, dot dot dot, then how come
obesity is a growing problem in this
country instead of a shrinking one?
The answer is simple - our bias towards
quick fix solutions compels us to buy
books that tell us what we want to hear.
Unfortunately, what is true for
diet books is equally true for campaign
promises.
The fourth step to becoming
an informed voter is to question the
conclusion. Do the facts support it?
There is a fallacy of logic known as
causation / correlation error. Think of a
teeter totter where facts sit at both ends,
but there’s really nothing in between that
connects them. Here’s an example: ice
cream sales and shark attacks go up in
the summer. Those are facts. Can we
conclude, therefore, that eating ice cream
causes shark attacks? Of course not.
Here’s another: 92% of people involved
in fatal collisions are right handed. Does
that mean that right handedness causes
traffic fatalities? Ha! Let’s try one more:
the price of gasoline is rising. Barack
Obama is president. Can we conclude
then that President Obama is driving gas
prices up? Totally ridiculous, but we’ve
all heard it, haven’t we?
I will leave you with this thought.
Ralph Nader wrote a non-political book
several years ago about the lessons he
learned from his father. As a young boy,
he sat at the dinner table each night and
told his folks what he’d learned that day
in math and science and history. His
father would suddenly interrupt him and
ask, “Tell me, son - did they teach you to
think, or did they teach you to believe?”
During the next six months, we will be
buried in an avalanche of slick campaign
advertisements written by some highly
paid people who want to influence the
way we vote. Do those highly paid
people want us to think? Or would they
prefer we believe? The answer to that
question defines the difference between
informed voters and sheep.
On Thursday, April 12 the
Vernonia School Board passed a new
model tobacco policy for the Vernonia
School District that deepens a focus on
creating healthy learning environments
for all students. This is important
because in Columbia County youth
use rates are significantly higher than
the state averages––11 percent of eight
graders and 20 percent of eleventh
graders smoke and 9% of eighth graders
and 14% of eleventh graders use chew
tobacco.
Tobacco use can be particularly
harmful in youth. According to the Center
for Disease Control and Prevention, 80
percent of adult smokers started smoking
before the age of 18. Younger people are
more likely to become addicted. That’s
why the updated policy now includes
tobacco products that are most enticing
to students such as tobacco strips, orbs
and nicotine and other nicotine delivery
devices. The policy also prohibits
any tobacco advertising on school
grounds and at school functions. It has
been developed to follow state statute
and therefore, stands for all campus
activities, even when school is not in
session or children are not present.
“Nicotine is highly addictive
and tobacco carries a mix of toxins and
carcinogens. That’s why it is imperative
to take a proactive approach to keep
youth from initiating tobacco use. This
means reducing their exposure on school
grounds.” said DeAnna Pearl of the
Vernonia Prevention Coalition. “Data
shows that even cigarette ‘lookalikes’
are harmful because it gives kids an
unrealistic perception of the risks
associated. For that reason, e-cigarettes
are also banned from the campus.”
The policy was developed
collaboratively with student groups; the
Vernonia School Wellness Team and
the Tobacco Prevention program staff
from the Public Health Foundation of
Columbia County. It was informed by
American Lung Association’s guidelines
and a property assessment by students.
“Policy is an important part of
creating a culture of change and help
create healthy places to live, work, learn
and play,” added Sherrie Ford, from
Public Health. “The fact that the policy
was developed by a true representation
of the school shows how important
health is to this community and how
much tobacco is recognized as a threat
to our youth.”
Vernonia School District Gets Tough on Tobacco to Protect
Student Health - Youth Tobacco Use Rates Higher Than the State Average
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