Jots and Thoughts of Jenny

To make sense of the next blog post that's stewing in the back of my head, I need to give a little background. Can we stop calling people "good people" the way we do right now? What's that phrase even supposed to mean? I don't think there are many people on earth who are actually straight-up evil. As a result, a "good person" in our nomenclature has become most commonly someone who looks like us, perhaps as an extension of that, someone who makes similar mistakes as us. Then when it turns out a "good person" behaved in a way that we disagree with, but not too strongly, we say, "Oh, but they're a good person," as in, "This isn't that big of a deal." Or, if someone tells us that individual has done something we really don't agree with, it becomes, "I just cannot believe they did that. They're a good person," almost as though your opinion of them as a good person makes them above any such mistakes. Or ...

I've got a set of three blog posts bottled up that are related to our upcoming election in the United States, but I'd prefer to keep them all as non-partisan as I can. I don't mind sharing my views (feel free to ask--some of them will probably be easy to discern anyway), but I'm actually sort of sick of seeing the partisan fighting, and so I'm going to try doing what I've been told is always a good idea in writing: writing the blog post(s) I wish I could read right now. Last night I listened to a panel discussion from three well-respected and fairly impressive journalists that I thought was supposed to be about race and democracy. To be fair, they did address that topic somewhat, and I appreciated some of the points they made. However, an awful lot of the panel discussion ended up being a rant (from all three of them) against a particular candidate. And this ranting was (mostly) on-topic, and for the most part I felt like what they said was fair, so I mostly tri...