Editorial voices from across the country
Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States:
The first step is admitting you have a problem. Denial is a large part of addiction, and breaking through self-deception can be very difficult.
What’s true of people with substance use disorders can also be true of their communities. Not only is it true of ours, the same rule applies to cities and towns across our country. Our community has a heroin and opioid painkiller problem. Denying that problem helps perpetuate it. Breaking through our self-deception is difficult but necessary if we are to save the lives of our friends, family members and neighbors who have this disorder.
They are victims of an illness. Yet we treat them differently. If they were victims of some different illness, whether it was the flu or cancer, we’d offer to watch their children, bake them casseroles, plan fundraising spaghetti dinners, set up GoFundMe campaigns. If they were victims of accidents – and most heroin addicts are victims of accidents – we would do all that and more.
It’s not exactly breaking news that experts are no longer held in high regard. Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency certainly was fueled by voters who believe that expert opinion has little claim to deference. But they are not by any means the only Americans convinced that uninformed views are every bit as valid as those held by people who have specialized knowledge.
Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, has lamented this situation in a provocative essay and new book.
He writes, “I fear we are witnessing the ‘death of expertise’: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers … By this, I do not mean the death of actual expertise, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. … Rather, what I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live.”
Certainly, as Nichols readily acknowledges, experts are sometimes wrong, occasionally with catastrophic consequences. (Thalidomide and the Challenger explosion are examples he cites.) But the chances of experts being right are pretty good, and we ignore them at our peril.
The historian Michael Beschloss made the case in devastating fashion in The New York Times following the collapse of the Republican health care bill this spring by contrasting the course pursued by Trump with that followed by Lyndon Johnson in shepherding Medicare into law in 1965. The former had little detailed knowledge of what was in his bill, while the latter mastered the detail.
Trump tried to ram the bill through Congress on the fast track, while Johnson patiently orchestrated his legislation through Congress. Trump didn’t know much about the legislators or the legislative process, while Johnson was intimately acquainted with both.
Soaring ratings couldn’t save Bill O’Reilly, whose ride at Fox News came to a crashing end after multiple accusations of sexual harassment.
No one should bleed for O’Reilly, who will be paid tens of millions of dollars in a buyout, according to reports. That he won’t receive as much as he would have been paid, had his contract been fulfilled, is of little consolation to people who are outraged that characters accused of such behavior still get rich.
There is nonetheless a worthwhile message to the stories of O’Reilly and other powerful and famous individuals whose attitudes and actions cause women to come forth in high numbers, accusing them of behavior more likened to Neanderthals than 21st century Americans. The days of “getting away with it,” just by being rich and famous, are ending.
This is an important signal at a time many Americans are uneasy – to say the very least – at what messages the Trump administration will send (and those their president has already sent) regarding levels or acceptable (or unacceptable) behavior.