Awake-ness? Yes, Please!
What a time we have had over the past couple of weeks. I have turned it over and over in my mind trying to understand why these latest couple of episodes of violence have felt different to me and, evidently to millions of people both here and internationally.
The violent deaths of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska seemed to have awakened people not only here in this country, but internationally, too. I have written here in the past about the “willful ignorance” that seems to affect us as a society and have spent a lot of time wondering if it has always been that way and how it got to be so bad and so widespread. If you are reading this, I think you may not be as far gone as some are—not because you are reading MY column, but because you are reading an independent newspaper with actual printed-on-paper words. It is so much easier these days to get our information from short videos or short little bits of text on a phone screen or a computer. It is much easier to turn on one “news” station or another on the TV, then half-listen while we do other things.
The problem with the way we receive information is that it is nearly totally passive. Back in the day when you could still get a daily newspaper delivered to your home, I preferred the newspaper to the TV news because I got to select which parts of it I consumed. Normal television news has thirty minutes to tell you the latest, which is not enough time to scratch the surface, even on a local station. Then they choose to take time to tell us about a small plane crash in England instead of telling us about a young woman stabbed to death on a light rail train in North Carolina—why is that? You may have heard about Iryna on social media if the algorithms had you pegged that way, which clearly I am not with all my sewing-knitting-farmsteadingart- animals social media activity.
My point is that news and information outlets have always had to filter what they tell us about, sometimes to fit a set amount of space or time, and sometimes to control the narrative. It is and has always been up to us to seek out other sources if we want the full and accurate story. Despite the tendency for internet-based information to be presented to us with tremendous bias in one direction or another, the facts are still out there for you to access. You will have to be skeptical and discerning. You will have to be careful to think rationally and logically and to remember just how deceptive wording, photo manipulation, and video editing can be. You need to familiarize yourself with just how good AI has become at generating completely realistic pictures and videos.
It takes effort and time to seek the truth, but the truth is out there for you to find. I think we have all been trained to be mentally lazy, but it is certainly worth our effort and time to seek out the truth, especially before we make major decisions like picking up a gun and killing someone else for what we have been told they said.
That is why the past couple of weeks have been different—they have awakened us to just how far things have slipped while we have not been paying attention. I am praying that we stay awake and continue taking action.