Information that was, is, and will be is the topic of this post. I think I know a thing or two about it considering all the years I spent in college extracting it from books and computers. Now, as a teacher and blogger, I’m always on the lookout for information, but only good information. There’s the line!
This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. If you’d like to learn ore about the prompt or write one yourself, please visit the link.
I spent the last two days at the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance. It was loaded with a ton of information I hadn’t thought about much prior to my visit. Most people are familiar with the Holocaust. Hitler and his Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jewish race. Thankfully, they were not successful. At the museum you learn how they duped a nation into thinking the Jews were the problem causing the depression and all of Germany’s social issues at the time. We learned that Jews made up only 1% of the population in Germany. Hitler gave propaganda to the people which was bad information. It made people vote for him as leader and enabled him to start his plan to destroy the Jews. This photo of an exhibit inside the museum shows a recreation of the two corridors the concentration camp victims were forced to choose from. If they were “Able Bodied” they could work probably 5 more months without starving to death in work camps. If they were women and children, their corridor led directly into the gas chamber. They looked to the sign for bad information. What signs do we look at today leading us to death and hate? More importantly, who is making those signs?
This kind of thing is still happening today. There are white supremacist websites and hate groups. There is even music that has hate-filled lyrics about restoring a perfect race. Along with the good information of the internet, there are tons of sites disseminating bad stuff tat can potentially cause killing and torture through brainwashing. That’s why it’s important to sort through bad information and cast it aside. There are things people can do to hinder hate in our times. If you’ve ever seen candlelight vigils after a hate crime, this is one way. It is like a public shaming against the killer. When Matthew Sheppard was killed for being gay, people came out in droves to a candlelight vigil and it was on all the news stations. It was one way of telling the killers “we don’t agree with you, your information is wrong.” In many ways, all of us are prejudiced but if we stop to recognize that, we may be able to get rid of some of it.
There are many ways to tell if information is bad or good. Sometimes just looking up the source can reveal a lot about it. That’s a positive aspect of the internet. If you publish a blog, be sure and speak out against the information you know to be false. Some people may ask why this applies to me. I will tell you it doesn’t apply to me directly but indirectly I see it does affect me. When someone in the world is killed in a hate crime, they lose their liberty. If one person’s liberty is snuffed out then my can be as well. So, for that reason, I am speaking about liberty for myself just as much as for them. We should do it because it’s the right thing to do of course but also for this reason. We all need to be holding the equivalent of a “candelight vigil” more often when we hear of these atrocities of hate. Always be wary of bad information. It can kill. Good information on the other hand can heal.
