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The U.S. Needs One Shared Reality

Patricia Hughes
5 min readMar 10, 2024

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Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

Politicians Create Alternative Realities for Their Gain

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Americans have lost the ability to agree on basic facts and it’s damaging the republic. Even amid a global pandemic that killed more than one million people, we couldn’t agree on basic public health measures like wearing a mask and maintaining distance. Some are still unable to agree about the results of an election, even after multiple investigations and court cases showed that the results are valid.

Two Sets of Facts

The people in this country appear to be well aware of their inability to agree on basic facts. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that both Republicans and Democrats agree that disagreements include the basic facts of issues. In the survey, 81% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats answered that voters in the parties disagree on the basic facts of political issues.

This is different than disagreeing on ideological ideas. Facts are facts. Reality is reality. Your opinion doesn’t matter when dealing with simple facts. One glaring example is the 2020 election. The Big Lie started with the former president and current Republican…

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Patricia Hughes
Patricia Hughes

Written by Patricia Hughes

Teacher, writer, freelancer, mindfulness practitioner, social justice and environmental activist. Twitter @phugheswriter

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