Now You Know
By: A.B. El-Ghorab
Tags: Democrats, Freedom Of Speech, Alllivesmatter, Blm, Republicans

Flags and representations: Pride. Blue Lives Matter. White. Black Lives Matter. Black.

If you are reading this in 2020, and you’re older than 15 years of age, you were born before 2005. If you’re between the ages of 15 and 30, you’re either a Millennial or a Gen-Z. It might be fun to watch all the comics and memes mocking these two generations; but the truth is that just like any normal, sane, human being: you have your thoughts, feelings, emotions, ideas, and maybe a religion that you believe in.

You grew up in a world that saw a major transformation in technology and social construct. You may not be fully aware of the magnitude of the latter — but make no mistake, they are very strongly correlated. You grew up in a world where the underdog must be supported, where minorities must be heard, where injustice is a given by virtue of the information available to you. But we must stop for a minute and ask ourselves, do we understand the world better just because we have “more information”? More information is just that, it’s more. It doesn’t mean the quality of information has increased, and it doesn’t mean that the value of it has increased either. Let that sink in for a minute. Think about it, digest it, and try to understand what it means.

Since data is widely available, it is your responsibility, if not to fact check, but to at least make sure you’re learning from sources other than Instagram and Facebook. If you’ve made the mildly better choice to seek news from media outlets, be vigilant of the political agendas and biases which almost always exist; you are aware of their existence, but might not fully take them into account when consuming their narratives. The term “fake news” is thrown around, but if a piece of news or an ideology appeals to the masses, no one in their right mind takes a moment to analyze its validity.

If an underdog or a seemingly oppressed person is involved, fact-checking might be a click away, but we would rather learn facts through raw footage. Raw footage is just that; it’s a moment in time that was recorded, it almost always tells part of the story. You can see racism being committed in a video, but you can’t uncover the racism in someone’s head through it. You can’t see the history of a racist cop in a video, you need to see their records. You can see a man commit a crime such as looting in a video, but you can’t conclude how large/small of a fraction he represents.

The “we know” rhetoric is even more dangerous. “We know XYZ person was this and that”…. gives your argument no validity whatsoever. When you give in to what “we know”, it can be manipulated, toyed with, and never questioned because “we know, we just know”.

You grew up in a society where “slut-shaming” is an unforgivable sin, staying true to your religion is made to look like hypocrisy, and having a point of view that is non-PC and doesn’t conform with the majority puts you on the opposite side of an argument. You’re marked as a racist, misogynist, condescending, judgmental, conservative, close-minded, and a bigot for not taking the “right” side even if you’re not taking the “wrong” side. “Everyone is entitled to have an opinion” but if yours differs, you shouldn’t be given a platform and you’re probably not worth conversing with. Left or right, liberal or conservative, you’ll always run into this wall; you’re being robbed of the right to create your image of the world given facts, numbers, and data that is abundantly available. You’re being pressured to consume ideologues backed by either something like MAGA posts or BLM protest footage. A clip of either a bearded Arab threatening the safety of a country or a video of Chick-fil-A being nasty to a member of the LGBTQ community.

Knowing all of this, shouldn’t we be more critical of data? Should we not be more critical of ideologies? Should we not search for the truth in data rather than in commentary and social media posts? Just a thought worth entertaining. It’s your life, you can make the choice for yourself. But now that you’ve read this — and probably agree with at least some of it — you can’t claim that you don’t. This is my version of “if you’re silent, you’re part of the problem.” You are either with critical thinking or you’ve joined that status quo against critical thinking. Now you know. Be a critical thinker.

-A.B. El-Ghorab