How Yellow Perch Can School Us About Social Media

 John Glenn first stepped onto the moon nine months before the Old Duck was graduated from college. This factoid is included here to provide my approximate age, hence to indicate when my values were formed, and to give the lie to malicious gossip that I am Abe Lincoln’s older classmate.

 

Back in college I learned in statistics class about the normal or bell curve. It looked like this:

 

 

This curve is very useful in describing the way many things occur in nature. Lots of stuff, that is, comes in a variety of sizes. The normal curve shows that most of the items usually are about an average, or "middling," size while fewer and fewer items are bigger or smaller the farther they are from average. For a simple example, think of catching a nice bucket full of perch in the honey hole on your favorite lake. Two or three are probably going to be runts, and another three or four are going to be relative “hogs,” but the great majority of the perch are going to be about the same size.

 

 

Most are average, or “normal.” I hope the perch take no offense at the term. 

 

When I listen to many radio or TV commentators these days, or browse the Internet, I get the impression that the normal curve has it all wrong. There seem to be two enemy camps, each thumping its righteous chest while decrying the ignorant vicious hordes of the opposition. Someone only casually observing such reporting might get the impression that the great majority of our fellow citizens occupies the far right and far left tails of the curve, with a scant few milquetoasts wavering in the middle. Such a curve might look like this, with more items in the tails than in the center:

 

 

I spend most of my time living a geezer’s retired exurban life. I walk the dog, buy some groceries, play some golf with my buddies, enjoy suppers with family and friends, all the while gladly taking people as I meet them. I find almost every single one of the flesh-and-blood people I meet “normal” in the curve’s sense. Those using social media to make outrageous claims on both the right and the left are having, if you’ll pardon the expression, the tails wag the dog.

 

So there you have it. Who are you going to believe? An honest mess of beautiful, tasty perch, or some nasty nameless gnome who’d rather tap a screen all day than have fun fishing?