Taking the "ism" way out

The news media has hailed this presidential election as unprecedented. One for the history books. A huge step forward for America no matter how you slice it, Democratic ticket or Republican ticket.

But in this fete of supposed progressive thinking, one archaic practice is still being tossed around by both the news media and by the politicians themselves: isms.

Racism. Sexism. Ageism. Fanaticism. Liberalism. Conservatism.

Isms are a quick fix for our brains -- a simple, tidy way of roping a group of people with related opinions together, setting them to one side and saying there. That's that. I get what you're about.

Yes, isms make us think we understand others when in fact they actually hinder our ability to truly do so. To use an ism is to generalize, and to in effect deny the diverse rationales that can lead people to hold the same opinion. We stoop to using isms either because we're too lazy or too narrow-minded to take time to think out these diverse rationales.

It's so much easier to argue that anyone who doesn't like Barack Obama is racist than it is to dig deeper, start a dialogue, find out what could really be behind this opinion.

A reporter can fit together an easy, crisp little story around the fact that Barack Obama is black, that Sarah Palin is a woman, and that these qualities attract and alienate certain voters. It would be difficult, however, to go beyond the "ism" buzzwords -- beyond this gross homogenizing of the American people -- to discuss why voters hold the opinions they do, why they value certain things in candidates, why other things don't appeal to them.

The sooner we step up to the task of discussing what's behind our differing opinions rather than ism-ing them away, the sooner we can really take that huge step forward that we've all been hearing about.