We as a global community have become completely self centered and
narcissistic.We shut ourselves off to other views and close our minds to new discoveries. We have stopped learning and collecting data and I find more and more people accepting things at face value with little or no compulsion to even fact check what has been learned.
Although we live in the age of technology having everything at our finger tips has made us lazy and therefore dumbing down our populations. If you read it, it does not make it true. Allow me to continue by saying, this is an opinion piece nothing I am writing is fact other than the rawest emotions that I'm spilling within its words.
This trend has created a harsh reality; we have lost accountability and the results are proving to be catastrophic. Even though certain social medias have made it easier to connect to millions around the world it has also destroyed personalization in our actions towards each other. It has made it easier to speak our minds but we have used these tools to insult a few words on a page, verses having the courage to say something to someone's face. It has made it easier to forget the human reading the message has feelings that can easily be hurt beyond repair. Bullies do not only live in the school yards but are running a muck in all corners of the earth.You can easily scar another human across the map with a few simple keystrokes. It seems easier to debate deconstruction, than it is to build positive foundations.
I have noticed that it has also created a misunderstanding between two words that should be self explanatory. The words "Fact" and "Opinion", are not synonyms. A fact is something that truly exist or has happened. An opinion is a belief or judgement about a particular thing.
Now days it is rare to find even a news source that states strictly facts without engaging a small or even a rather large majority of opinions mixed in its contexts. When the news we are being fed as truth becomes unreliable, I feel we have reached a very sad time in history. We need to stop taking people's opinions as truth and we need to start holding our journalists and news broadcasters more accountable for the reports we are reading.
The only way to do this is to double check the resources until they are forced to do their jobs with integrity. I realize it is their responsibility to fact check, but when they are not being held accountable for leaving that part of their job out, then we allow it to continue. When something does not look right or reads as an opinion, then I believe we have a civic duty to research and call them out on any misinformation that is found. There needs to be consequences for reporting anything other than a factual statement about something that has happened. Let the opinions be saved for blog's such as this one. When it comes to news it should be reports of actual facts about what took place, no opinions.
I believe we all need to start being held accountable for our own actions, stop pointing fingers and start looking in the mirror. Starting from this point we can then start by fixing ourselves instead of being so quick to judge others. I have found by experience it takes one to know one, so when we point out flaws in others we are really seeing our own. It is not easy to accept what we do not like about ourselves, however you cannot fix something until you know what is broken. We can change for the better if we have the strength to see what is at its worst.
We can look towards the new year and I think we should collectively as a concerned society make the resolution to start from the bottom and work our way back up to greatness. We have potential that lives beyond our own capacity of belief. We are highly intelligent people that seem to have lost our way. We can make a positive change, it took a course of bad habits that brought us to this state, it will take considerable effort but we can train our brains to think more positively and allow ourselves to pick each other up, instead of knocking each other down.
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