[AL.com] Just because (insert political opponent) says it doesn’t make it false.
Conservative-minded people have inherent tendencies — from a natural resistance to abrupt change to a sometimes-automatic adherence to traditions, even those that could be obsolete.
And progressives have their own — from the willingness to accept radical change based more on hope than history to the dismissal of ancient wisdom simply because it’s ancient.
But the way some of our leaders have reacted to the pandemic, and the way some partisan national media outlets have covered it, are prime examples of a tendency we may all share, no matter our political affiliation.
We tend to reflexively defend anyone or anything our political opponents criticize, as though our dislike of the person doing the criticizing means the criticized couldn’t possibly deserve it.
Such reflexive defensiveness against what we see as bullying means we often choose willful blindness.
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