These days we do not suffer a lack of quantity of information, but of quality.
I learned to read in 1964, before the Internet and personal computers. We lived in a small village of 400 that was augmented every academic year by about 1,500 college students. The village had a small library that I loved, (the University library was much bigger) but it suffered from lack of breadth and depth for adults, and also little kids as they were not its focus.
We had ABC, NBC and CBS and sometimes on UHF we had PBS and if the wind was right, we could get a Canadian broadcast channel. My parents invested in a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, a godsend because I was able to look up historical events et al to enhance my schooling. Let’s say that I was always in search of additional information.
Move to college graduation and my first real job, working as a policy analyst in the areas of insurance, commerce, and governmental operations. I was wet behind the ears and thrown into the deep end at age 21 and I loved every minute. Analyzing and writing laws that affected millions of people. Wow!
We didn’t have the political silos then that we have today. Every day I purchased the local newspaper, plus the New York Times for global coverage and, on Wednesdays, the Village Voice for political information in New York City. I needed all three, plus numerous educational journals and industry publications. Plus scuttlebutt, of course, which usually was political in nature.
My job was to sift through it and find out the truth and act on those beliefs in a way that helped the people of New York State. One busy day I got in really early, laid the newspapers on the floor beside my chair and got to work. My boss came in, early, and asked what I was doing. “Work,” I replied. He told me something I’ve never forgotten to this day, that reading the news was a part of my job and if I did not do so I’d be ill-informed and make bad decisions. So, I read the newspapers then got to work. OK.
Today with all the choices we have, I read as much as I can, mainly online, from many available sources. On television, I watch mainly mainstream news but check out Fox News every day to see what’s going on in that political mind-set. When I walk the dog, I walk the dog. I’m not on my phone at all but sometimes carry it with me in case of emergency, especially if it’s dark out. I wouldn’t know how to access the deep web and do not hold stock in conspiracy theories.
When I hear that young people get all their news from TikTok or Facebook, I don’t understand it. I could never consider myself well-informed if I relied on just one source of information. The first questions I ask are who is promoting this story (who owns this franchise) and what do they get from telling me this. If you can answer that, you can still glean the information but consider other sources before making a decision.
Banning books in school and telling children what to think is not a good road to a stable democratic republic, which we still have. If we give children access to age-appropriate materials and teach them English, Math, History, Science and encourage them to also learn on their own, we may be pleasantly surprised at the well-rounded adults we have raised.
I had a boyfriend once who, when we went to Mass together, insisted on sitting on the right side (as one enters the church from the rear) so that the world would know he is conservative. My response? What if God is up front and thinks you’re sitting on the left? He didn’t like that much. He also told me if we married, it would be OK for me to work for “pin money.” I asked what he would do if I made more money than he. Out of the question!
Years later, after I broke it off, I was in his hometown for business and we went to dinner (he wanted to tell me of his engagement, a sweet thing to do). After dinner we stopped for a drink at my hotel and I took pleasure in introducing him to my assistant, a MAN! Boy, was he glad we didn’t marry! But I got information from all sources, and the end result is that any marriage to that particular gentleman would have been a disaster for both of us. It’s good to know he’s still married and has grown kids. And he’s probably, no definitely, in the Trump camp. What a world we live in. Cheers! Dee
Cooking with Dee 