DEAR EDITOR:

It’s a different world today, one that I find troubling. Our problems seem more intense today.

While attending a recent high school football game to see my grandson play, my first thought upon seeing the crowd was “who has a gun and wants to do harm?”

I am not anti-gun; I own guns, and I qualify every year to ensure my capability of handling a gun. I support strict gun laws and ownership.

To better explain needed change, I’ll compare today’s problems with workforce safety and health, a field I’ve been involved with for 45 years. Exchange “workforce” for “society.”

For those in the field of occupational safety and health, ensuring our employer or client provides safe, healthy working environments mandated by law, we rely on rules and regulations. Those of us who have done this for some time realize injuries, illness and lack of compliance will still rear their ugly heads. Human behavior is one ingredient in life’s recipe that we (anyone but the one undertaking the wrongdoing) cannot control. This is the facility’s “culture,” or for this letter, today’s “social culture.”

Human or social culture is a system of shared assumptions, values and beliefs, which govern behavior.

For now, let’s ignore behavior derived from medical problems, physical or mental. Let’s address how behavior is triggered by influence.

The triggering of behavior, thus becoming an accepted culture, often results from explanations provided and/or supported by another, even if that explanation is based on assumption or nonfactual occurrence. In other words, if you tell a lie often enough, people will come to believe it.

It’s my opinion that lying and sharing assumptions is why we are experiencing today’s experiences — climate changes, world disturbances and domestic and social unrest.

Think of all recent false accusations, statements and claims, fake COVID-19 virus, stolen election, they will take your guns, and others proven wrong via facts. This constant barrage of assumptions and lies has formed today’s social culture of mistrust, hatred, anti-regulations, anti-law enforcement and anti-government.

Our nation is now 246 years old. We remain “free,” the greatest nation in the world. Yes, we have problems, but it was “truth” that always won and directed us to ensure our freedom, rights and great nation.

We must address and change today’s social culture. That will be accomplished only by accepting truth and ignoring accusations, false claims and negative statements. That truth, those supportive proclamations, must come from our leaders who have best intentions for our nation at heart, not a personal goal, not one with arrogant, egotistical attitudes that lead with a personal, rather than societal, goal of achievement.

Think about that when you vote! God Bless America!

JOHN P. LESEGANICH SR.

Canfield