This blog usually contains a recipe and wine pairing from the Rick Podowski and The Hefty Trio mystery series. Since many of us are still trying to figure why Trump was elected, I am going to offer the insights that I gained from my cats. Chapter 15 of Mellow Out--Lesson Learned From Household Cats ($1.99) is reprinted below.
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| Samantha |
I never cut class. I loved getting A’s. I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.
Michelle Obama
Respect People Who Are Not Very Bright
“He’s stupid.” “What an idiot.” “Does he even have an IQ?” "Is he blind?" These are statements typically made when people profusely disagree with a comment made by someone else or when an umpire makes a bad call at a baseball game. Many people think that these retorts provide an answer to the original comment, but all they really do is to reflect on the intelligence of the speaker. Is it possible to love and respect people who are not as bright as you?
This chapter is being written during the middle of the 2016 primary campaign, and Donald Trump is attracting record crowds, as well as winning the majority of delegates to the convention. In fact, it’s so bad that party leaders are banning together to try and stop The Donald. Mr. Trump wants to deport eleven million undocumented workers, build a wall across the US-Mexican border and put a moratorium on allowing Muslims into the country. It is obvious that these things cannot happen based on cost, our constitution, and our laws.* Even so, millions of Americans support Trump, and they want him to be our president. Every Trump supporter can’t have inferior intelligence, so something else must be going on.
The Senate’s most vocal critic of the scientific consensus on climate change is Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma. On February 27, 2015, he brought a snowball to the Senate floor to “prove” that global warming is a hoax. If it’s cold outside, then global warming can’t exist. After Inhofe finished his speech, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, one of the most vocal proponents for policies to curb global warming, went to the floor to rebut Inhofe’s claims.
“I want to respond to the presentation by one of the Republican senators suggesting that the continued existence of snow disproves climate change,” Whitehouse said before explaining how studies by NASA and other credible organizations have proven through various scientific methods that the planet is warming.
Inhofe is a United States senator and chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, so I don’t believe that he can be so misinformed. Something else is in play.
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| The Mitzer |
Perhaps the behavior of my cats can provide an answer to this senseless situation where educated people with lots of power and authority advocate really dumb things. We have an eight-foot fence around our yard. The Mitzer likes to sit on the top rail of the fence. Since I am 5’11”, there is no way I can reach the Mitzer. However, every time I stand next to the fence, the Mitzer runs down the fence to the gate and then jumps on the roof. In about fifteen minutes, she returns. This is a typical pattern.
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| Chubby Wubby |
If Chubby is sitting on the patio chair, I can pet her. However, if she is sitting in the yard and I go up to her, she runs. Eventually, I get tired of chasing her. These actions are examples of instinctual behaviors. When Chubby is hunting, she becomes the master of agility and speed. We can puff ourselves up and say that cats are not as smart as humans. However, the reality is that they have a different type of intelligence.
Howard Gardner developed the theory of multiple intelligences. The theory states that there are seven ways people understand the world: Verbal-Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Visual-Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical-Rhythmic, Interpersonal, and Intrapersonal. Everyone has all of these seven types of intelligence, but they are ordered differently in each individual. A football player has a bodily-kinesthetic intelligence so he may be outstanding when playing the game, but his linguistic intelligence may be last so he does very poorly in English and debate.
This country has been in love with television game shows since the 1950s. Shows like The $64,000 Question, Jeopardy, and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? are three among the thousands of game shows that have been on the television networks. The lights and the music contribute to the tension as the contestants are forced to quickly respond. The winners are rewarded with a huge amount of money Are the winners more intelligent than the other contestants because their response time was less? Not really. They just have a Linguistic intelligence that is more highly developed than the others. For me, I would rather associate with someone who is slower to produce the answer but uses a Logical-Mathematical type of intelligence.
Linguistic intelligence with quick responses does work well in the game show environment. However, it may not be appropriate for an engineer designing a bridge where environmental factors, safety, costs and efficiency all have a role to play in terms of the final design.
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| Willie |
Maybe the response to Trump supporters, Senator Inhofe and those people that appear to be not very bright is that they are looking at the situation from a different intelligence angle. For example, Trump may be engaging his audiences at an interpersonal level, and because they like him, his lack of substance may not be important to them.
So when we try to evaluate a person’s ideas, it’s good to be open to other perspectives. Often we are so sure that we are right that we fail to at least entertain the other person’s point of view. From reading Gardner and observing my cats, it is clear that everything is not black and white. We have to examine the context before we make a judgment and resist name-calling because the person has a different position.
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*It is difficult to believe that Trump is trying to implement his agenda.
