Cherry-picking is epidemic these days.  People use it as a launching pad for their fury. You see, if you can ignore the context of the many facts surrounding a problem, a situation, a person, an organization – then you can continue in your self-righteous fury unabated. And self-righteous fury is sooo the new lazy.  If you can pick only one or two cherries out of the bowl and pretend that the rest don't exist, it's pretty easy to be sure that you're right.

Gone are the old-fashioned days when more of us sought to understand each other, tried to grasp the facts, and might have even given putting them in context a go. Anger is sometimes the appropriate response after all that, but these days it's full-on fury out-of-the-starting-gate.

Our institutions are beginning to reflect our hair-trigger fury and bent towards preferring only the facts that support how we want to feel. The market-tested-out-the-wazoo-uber-individualized culture we live in knows exactly what we want and we want fury. And they're all about giving us what we want. Fury is good for ratings. We have whole evenings of programming devoted to cherry-picking in service of fury.  Maybe we're getting the television, the newspapers, and the Congress we deserve?

So join us in trying our best to understand the whole bowl of cherries, all the facts and guiding wisdom.  As far as problem solving goes, it beats fury hands-down.