Sunspots (https://sunspots.cornellsun.com/tag/news/)
The last two weeks have been rough. They have been really really rough. Trump has imposed the travel began, ordered the construction of the wall, appointed a Secretary of Education who favors “for-profit” charter schools, cozied up to Russia and signed more “law and order” executive actions. The list could keep going. I actually think the press has not done too terrible of a job covering these stories.
As a college student, sometimes I feel like I am in a bubble, or have blinders on. Here at Cornell, and probably at many other schools, you can go through your daily life focusing on nothing but school, those around you and whatever is happening on campus. With this, you can find yourself being unaware of what is going on outside of the boundaries of the campus, or the community where your college is located. With the incredible amount of work that undergraduates have and the vast amount of material you are supposed to learn and retain in order to succeed in your coursework, it is easy to let watching the news or reading the paper slide. But it can become a habit, and once it becomes habitual, it becomes a new norm.
Having devoted the better part of my free time to social media (and not proudly so), it has been remarkable to witness the transformation in the kind of material that crops up in my feed. There have been tangible shifts, to the extent that everyone I know seems to have become a political activist at some level. Recently though, I have gotten into too many spats with people who have pulled out articles they saw on their Facebook feed on the alleged perpetuation of rape culture by the present-day Indian society, or people who have quoted a friend’s tweet verbatim to back up their point about the presidential primaries, only to stand corrected after being presented with a news report that speaks otherwise. I have become extremely wary of these quickly formulated opinions: while everyone is at perfect liberty to air theirs, generalized statements featuring charged words make me immediately put my guard up. I think this largely stems from my worries about where such opinions originate and whether they are informed or not.