It’s More About Us and the Children Than Mark Z

by Ernie McCray

When I look at this situation with Mark Zuckerberg hosting harmful bits of misinformation on his social media brands, Facebook and Tik Tok and Instagram, I think of the children who’re watching us, “We the People,” pretty much leave this problem up to him.

And, yeah, this non-caring billionaire should do something to alleviate this state of affairs but I don’t like the picture our children are seeing of us not doing much about these circumstances ourselves – since the PCs, through which we receive so much news that deceives, also allow us to get the skinny about things: the facts.

More facts, in fact, than we can shake a stick at, at the drop of a hat, and when you add, to that, a pinch of common sense, we would be modeling, for our kids, what “critical thinking” is.

They need to see us acting wisely. Using our heads.

But we Americans seem to be “misinformation-driven,” if you will, as though “we can’t handle the truth.” We oppose actuality as though it’s our mortal enemy like, for instance, not being the least bit interested in “Critical Race Theory” being taught in our children’s classrooms when it is essentially at the core of our very history.

It can’t do our youth much good observing us acting stupidly – not with the challenges they’re going to face in an extremely uncertain future.

If they’re going to make the word better, and I do hope that’s what we want for them, they will need to be way more clear-headed regarding social and political matters than we have been.

They will have to be people who, unlike us, don’t need a president’s falsehoods erased because they would know, after having seen him waste every day of his four-year presidency spreading whopping lies, that he was 50 percent shuck and an equal percent jive – and they would look at a claim he made that Covid-19 would disappear and fade away, with different eyes, considering the thousands of their fellow citizens dying by the thousands every day.

They will have to be people who, when hearing that he’s “facing down a shady cabal of democratic pedophiles,” would say “Hmmm,” since one of his chums was arrested for sex-trafficking minors and killed himself in jail rather than face the charges.

They will have to be people who would dismiss his phony narrative about an election being stolen because they would be very aware that there had been powerful organizing around getting people to the polls that, indeed, prevented tampering with the vote.

They would later take note that their president sicced hundreds of “Stop the Steal” terrorist yahoos on the United States Capitol Building in a continuation of his efforts to change the vote count – as the world observed in shock.

So, we need to raise a generation who wouldn’t dare accept behavior like what’s been laid out here, a generation that can:

see
the difference between
fact and fantasy
and bullshit and reality
with their own eyes;
discriminate
between the sounds
of craziness and lucidity
with their own ears;
detect
asinine unfounded
conspiracies,
with their
natural human instincts
for distinguishing nonsense
from what makes sense…

Who needs a social media
billionaire tycoon
to separate
right from wrong
when informed citizens
can do that on their own?
This is on us.