Legislative News Random Prattling, Jabbering & Nattering An opinion article by Doug Franzen In last month’s column, I invited readers to respond to my comments and engage in a respectful conversation, particularly if they disagreed with something I said. Thankfully, several of you did. The first responder felt that I exhibited a bias in favor of Senator Gazelka and was unfair to Governor Walz. This response while strongly worded, was civil and contained no personal attacks on me (probably due to the writer’s knowledge of my low self-esteem). It was perfect. A second reader called me to tell me he liked my column even though he may disagree with some of its content. Both communications made my day. This is the type of conversation I was hoping for. There are a bunch of really smart folks (Socrates, etc.) who understand that the purpose of an argument is not to win but to learn. I learned something from the responses including something about myself. Thank you, readers!
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One responder felt that my anti-Walz bias was apparent and noticed that I did forewarn readers that my bias would seep through into my column. In fact, I like Governor Walz. I think he, with the benefit of the wise counsel of Commissioner Jan Malcolm, has shown courageous and effective leadership in managing our Covid crisis. However, he has not demonstrated that he understands or cares about snowmobiling and its impact on our quality of life. Also, I do like Senator Gazelka. He has proven to be a strong friend to MnUSA and all Minnesota snowmobilers, yet we do not see eye to eye on the pandemic. So, while I try to limit my perspective to snowmobile matters, bias does creep in. FYI, I have no idea who I will support for Governor in the upcoming election. It would be helpful if Governor Walz did show me that I am wrong and show support for our sport (hint, hint). A word about bias: We all have opinions capable of metastasizing into bias. The problem is that we don’t always know it. Our bias is both conscious and unconscious. It’s the unconscious bias that gets us into trouble. We tend to find truth in reports that agree with our opinions regardless of the evidence. This truth finding is nothing more than confirming our bias and is therefore agreeable to us. Again, we all do
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