Originally published in the Spirit of Jefferson on September 24, 2025
We’re all sitting here in the America we love, but it’s a wildly different America from the one of just a few years ago. We’ve changed and we’re still changing in ways some think we’re becoming better and others that we’re becoming worse. But here in our little spot in Jefferson County, West Virginia things haven’t changed drastically. We’re more or less the same, though there are more of us, and more coming. It’s the housing booThe way I see it, the main reason for our changing world is that a substantial segment of our voting public became convinced the America of a few years ago was doing us wrong. In the mind of this group, America was slow-footing into a “nanny culture.” We were so concerned about keeping the population (all the people, everyone, even non-Americans!) healthy, well nourished, safely housed, and usefully educated that we were letting up on the accelerator that made us a great country. We were stalling progress, maybe because our attention was so unfocused on the actual drivers of prosperity.
Progress in WV and in the Eastern Panhandle comes about slower than elsewhere, but our state and local governments are definitely trying to press down on the accelerator. They declare that the state needs less kumbaya and more respect for the kinds of people who made us great. Those would be, in their minds, people who by evidence of their billions and their status are the real drivers of our success. These would be white men mostly.
They argue that our New Deals and our “socialist” leaning programs are impeding the efforts of our elites to stay productive, that “lefties” are trying to redistribute wealth to those who don’t deserve it. Implied is that they are making the American Dream an impossibility. However, the American Dream has always been elusive in poor, unhealthy, poorly educated, stuck West Virginia.
But is any of this criticism true? Have our past socially oriented policies really stifled innovation and productivity? It used to be that those policies were initiated from the political left, but also from the conservative right. It was pretty bipartisan. Now the right is pretty much against all that smacks of raising all boats, hence the open hostility to DEI–diversity, equity, and inclusion. So the truth of what constitutes a social problem, and who such problems impact, and whether and how to resolve those problems all seems to be anchored in divergent notions of what truth it.
The so-called gold-standard pathway to truth resides in a process of verifying the connection between causes and effects. You start off with an idea, formulate it as a hypothesis, and then go about accumulating evidence that the hypothesis is likely or not to be valid. It’s the process that gave us modern medicine, the Internet, and modern technology and made us the richest country in the world. It also made us a favorite destination for people wanting to tap into that mojo of ours.
But there are a lot of people who find their truth by way of a different process. Their pathway to the truth lies in belief, pure and simple. It skips the thought process and shortcuts the evidence gathering and goes directly to conclusions.
The disconnect between these two pathways to truth ultimately creates conflicting versions of what is true. Vaccination is good; vaccination is bad. Climate change is human caused; climate change is just earth being itself. Trans people are just people; trans people are defective.
If the truth is so slippery, maybe there’s really no such thing as truth at all. One group’s truth becomes another’s ignorance. One group’s acceptance is another’s betrayal. One group’s beliefs are another’s apostasy. Some examples:
- One million Americans died of Covid before we had a vaccine. After the vaccine, they stopped dying in such large numbers. Was it the vaccine or was it the intercession of a benevolent supreme being?
- Our east coast is being eroded and cities are frequently flooded. Is it just Mother Nature on a tear or is it because we’ve polluted our atmosphere with coal and gas?
- Trans people are undeniably people and function like most any other people, except they’re happier and more productive than they were before they transitioned. Should their happiness be denied them because some others don’t want them using their bathroom?
- School children are killed, maimed and traumatized by guns. Do we protect these innocents by regulating gun use or do we increase gun ownership on the premise that guns will protect them?
I and people of a similar persuasion personally try to be respectful of different claims on truth. We try to negotiate rather than dictate. We don’t ban books some people don’t like. We don’t try to make prayer mandatory. We don’t stop investment in clean energy. We don’t jeopardize a community’s well-being by promoting businesses who don’t care about our community. We don’t disrespect the history and the culture of any of the groups who make up our population.
We believe in democracy, government, and the rule of Constitutional law as the best means to navigate through the disconnects we have in our society. It’s a slower and maybe not so efficient way to keep us steaming along. It is, though, the best way to assure that this country ultimately becomes the “more perfect union” the Framers envisioned. The union will not stay a union otherwise.