I’m heading into this holiday season thankful for a lot of things.

As the holidays take over, I think of how lucky I am to have received such a great education and how I look forward to giving back to my community with my skills.

I’m also a loud and proud member of the reality-based community.

A few months back, Ron Suskind reported in the New York Times Magazine on the people who help the president. One of them pointed out to Ron that the problem with blue-state residents is that we are reality based. We refuse to let rhetoric and easy answers be our guide. Instead we search for the truth (or, as our university calls it, “sifting and winnowing,” a great reality-based motto). The aide went on to explain that most Americans don’t want to believe “our” truth and prefer to have their reality managed by those in charge and given to them in easily digestible bits.

Reality-based members of the community put on their thinking caps and get critical instead of regurgitating the mantras and sound bites of their leaders. They refuse to believe every word of our government as being, literally, gospel. We defend our beliefs with justifications based on facts and experience.

To that end, we get uncomfortable when conservative parents force school districts to put stickers on science textbooks that alert their readers to the fact that there are competing theories to evolution. This is true, but they’re not science.

We also, here in the reality-based community, get upset when we learn that abstinence education is riddled with inaccuracies. These Bush-backed programs came under fire from Rep. Henry Waxman, who recently released a report that shows the glaring errors and untruths promoted by many of these programs. They claim, among other whoppers, that teens can get pregnant just by touching another teen’s genitals. I suppose it depends what you touch it with … but I digress.

These programs also promote the gender stereotypes 30 years of feminism has handily disproven, dismantled and disowned. The textbooks teach values that insist men have to be reassured that they are providing for the family, and that a woman’s role is subservient and helpful. My favorite is the story of the princess who gives too much advice to her knight. He leaves her for a village maiden who keeps her mouth shut because the princess who spoke so much left the knight feeling “ashamed.” These lessons are vital to remind teens going into the wider world that the man is always right and to keep your trap shut. One hundred seventy million of your tax dollars are going to promoting this tripe, but don’t question this!

As a reality-based and reality-educated member of society, I’ve got a lot of ‘splaining to do for the rest of this country. Unfortunately, they don’t want to hear it.

Have you ever traipsed over to the redder sections of the Internet? Townhall.com, FreeRepublic.com, Little Green Footballs, etc., etc. Here you see the full-blown ignorance and refusal to live in the real world of many denizens of our nation. The burning fervor of belief trumping knowledge wafts through the air. I dare you, member in good standing of the reality-based community, to read Ann Coulter and not go cross-eyed.

You know the knock on Madison as being however-many square miles surrounded by reality. Ironically, it took a member of Bush’s own staff to point out that we’ve found reality, but the rest of the 52 percent who voted for Bush proudly put their heads in the sand.

As a member of the reality-based community, we use test cases to prove points. The current push to privatize Social Security, or at least allow people to invest their retirements in the stock market on the government dime, is a bad idea.

A few weeks ago, it was uncovered that Sen. Bill Frist has lost $460,000 of his campaign money by investing poorly in the market. He’s so broke he can’t cover a bank loan he recently took out.

Besides the always-delicious irony of Republicans who can’t manage their finances, if Frist can’t manage his money, why do we assume average Americans are going to make smart choices in the market? They may, but more likely, many will not.

A reality-based argument would say that privatizing Social Security, like many issues Bush wants to push in his second term, is a leap of faith. That’s not what reality-based thinkers take. True believers have leapt off that cliff willingly, but reality-based thinkers don’t lemming their ways into the future.

Rob Deters ([email protected]) is a third-year law student.