On any given day in America, when you step out your front door, you will encounter someone of a different gender, different race, different religious belief, different sexual orientation, etc. The list goes on and on for miles. However, in recent events, the racial differences in this country have become more prominent, not only more prominent, but they are headline news almost every day.
In a matter of days, we have seen headline after headline of an innocent person being shot and killed by an angry, fearful killer. And rather than taking the time to pray for the situation or give blood or smile at your neighbor, we have taken to posting our every thought and emotion on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Do you want to fix the racial divide in this country? Delete your social media.
No, that’s not a joke. If you want to fix the division of the races in this country, you start by deleting your social media and urging your friends to do the same. For most people, this is enough for you to decide you don’t want to fix the race divide. And I can hear it now, “But what if I only post positive things?” Hear me out. We so often complain about the fact that our media is biased. According to the Huffington Post, only six percent of Americans trust the media that gives us all of our daily news, like newspapers, magazines, radio, and television stations. So if only six percent of Americans trust what they read about in their papers and hear about on their TV’s why is it so enticing to give in to the banter on social media?
Clearly, people who write things on social media are not journalists with degrees from esteemed Universities. Most people writing their opinions on social media are not using proper grammar, so why do we so often give in to what we read about in the comments section? Because we are a nation obsessed with time and the shortest thing we have to read the better, the shortest video we have to watch, the better. So rather than watching the five-minute news story, we read what our friends thought about it on Facebook. Rather than getting all of the facts from the article written by a professional, we read what our friends replied on Twitter. 140 characters is not enough to wrap our minds around the anger, hatred, and fear that is plaguing our country right now.
If you want to help, if you want to be different, you have to make a choice. You have to decide to be the person who goes to the source rather than to your friends or you have to delete your social media. We are so blinded to the truths of the situations because we would prefer to listen to our favorite celebrity share their opinion instead of getting the whole story.
So today, I plead with you, I beg you to turn off your phone. Give Instagram a rest and read a newspaper. Or watch both CNN and Fox News in order to hear both sides of the story and decide from there. I don’t want you to forfeit your right to your own opinion, I want your opinion to be intelligent and validated. Because your true feelings and opinions do matter, but you don’t need to sway all of your friends into thinking the same way you do.
Then after you have become more informed, tuck all of that knowledge away and go do something that is helpful. Give blood, the Red Cross is in desperate need of blood to give to the victims of so many of these horrible crimes. Serve food to the homeless, help a neighbor, be a friend. Do something loving. There is a quote that has been attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. that says, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” So spread the love and stop taking a side.
