Rick Snyder said:
In my day to day travels and visits with the people here the subject of politics and economy come up every day in conversation. If it doesn't come up I always bring it up. Invariable someone, this applies to all classes of Dominicans, will say the now famous sound-bite, "there's no money on the streets". On the local TV channel two nights ago an individual told the people here that the 7% improvement in the economy was a lie fabricated by the Dominican government and then went on to say that Leonel had no business going to Haiti because it served no purpose. He said that the president needs to stay here and take care of the problems here and that Hippo would never have gone to Haiti like Leonel. He then said the aforementioned sound-bite.
Nal's your assessment is totally correct but it is so difficult for the poor to understand this as the trickle down effect hasn't really reached them yet and there are people that are, I will use your words, "saying anything opposite is either dilusional, in disbelief, or wish it wasn't so." The person mentioned above that gave that false sermon on TV is a die hard, card carring PRD member.
The war that the Dominicans are fighting covers many fronts and it's difficult to fight these varied fronts with such a lack of soldiers.
Rick
Every day that passes I am coming more to the conclusion that most people don't believe in the truth.
Most people only believe in what makes sense to them, and often times what makes sense is hardly the truth!
This is due to perceived "evidence" that people see with their eyes and if someone says something that justifies what they are seeing in a way that makes sense, they will believe that to be the truth, and thus act upon that.
As usual, my father was right!
The truth is whatever people want it to be!
Now that we got this out of the way, perhaps the ruling administration should start a parallel campaign in making sense of everything that is occuring to the masses, in order to counter the damaging lies that only the poor are buying from jealous rivals, especially PRD.
Any person with the slightest hint of intelligence and who thinks for him/herself would quickly realize that things are better today, the economy is working as it should, and quite frankly, the country could not be in a much better position because this is the best position the country can be, given what happened in the past few years.
The issue of whether the economic figures are lies is none sense. A group of IMF inspectors came to the republic to revise these numbers about a month ago and they concluded these numbers are legitimate!
If we want this country to move forward, we must teach the masses how to think for themselves, how to research information and not take anything said to them at face value, how to come to their own conclusions based on facts and figures.
This little habit of letting others do the thinking for them is not good either now or ever!
-NAL
