 Sound bites in today’s world are as inevitable as they are the nemesis of clear thinking. Politics thrives on sound bites. Why use a hundred words to explain something when you can have more impact with two or three? Slogans and phrases are intended to arouse emotions, which they do, but in social media they can harden into opinions and battle cries, or conspiracy theories, which somehow replace research and critical thinking. "Who has time for debate and research when you already know what’s true.” a friend commented facetiously to me. But at the same time, he was deadly earnest.
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 I watched Anderson Cooper narrate an hour TV primer on QAnon (“Q”). Anderson (know as "A Cooper” on the deep web) was trying to reason with a man who wrote the commentator that he wanted to execute him (exact reasons were unclear). A fallback for Q is promising to execute evil celebrities; that seems to up recruitment numbers. There’s more. Did anyone know there was a tunnel running underground from the Vatican to Jerusalem?
I remember the significant outcry in 2016 when Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the National Anthem, protesting racial injustice. The nerve of an athlete using his knee to desecrate our beloved anthem, many said. Last year, a video showed a police officer planting his knee on George Floyd's neck, suffocating him to death. The victim was a troublemaker, said many of the same people irate with Kaepernick. This year, one of the rioters storming the Capitol, bending over if not quite kneeling, used an American flag pole to beat a police officer nearly to death. The rioter was protesting the results of an election. The response I heard from a vast number of “patriots" was an eerie, haunting silence.
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