Let’s talk about the Holidays

 

It’s that time of year where we celebrate a lot of things. The time of year where is sucks to be outside so we do our best to be indoors and have a good time with people who might annoy the hell out of us. The time of year where we try to spread kindness and cheer to others. The time of year where we hear the unintelligent and brain washed morons tell us there is “a war on Christmas.” I’m talking about the Holiday Season.

This time of year, means so many different things to different people. However, I want to address this war on Christmas crap before I get too far into this. There is no war on Christmas. Pseudo Christians try to use this argument to push the narrative that this season is about their religion. It’s not. Between November 1^st and January 15^th, there are about 29 major holidays celebrated by no less than 7 of the world’s major religions. Sorry, Karen, this season is not just about the baby Jesus.

I also want to point out really quick how the Puritans, early American settlers, actually banned Christmas in America (at the time simply known as the New World) in 1659 due to the holiday’s ties to paganism. This was later revoked in 1681. So, for a while, Christians didn’t even celebrate Christmas. Now I could continue to rip apart the ridiculous arguments that these modern Christians use to justify the “war on Christmas” thing but, that’s not really important or what I wanted to talk about any way.

What I wanted to talk about is people. Whether it’s Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Las Posadas, or Yule, the idea is the same, celebrating what is truly important. At Thanksgiving here in America, many households have a tradition of telling everyone what they are thankful for. Most families all over the world celebrate whichever holiday they celebrate by coming together. Sometimes this means having a wonderful time with friends and family. Sometimes it means giving back to the community we live in. Sometimes it means doing something for those who have less than we have.

Good will and Cheer, right? That is what all these holidays mean in our modern world. However, the reality is that not everyone has that. Some people don’t have family or friends close to them. Sometimes people don’t even have a place to gather or get a hot meal. This time of year, can be difficult for some. Whether it be loved ones no longer there to celebrate with the rest of the family or someone spending time all alone because they are not welcome at home, it’s important that we do our best to try to support each other.

I have had a lot of experiences in my life. I have been homeless on Christmas. I have spent more than one holiday all by myself because of strained or nonexistent relationships with family. I have had to rely on charity just to make sure my young step kids actually had a Christmas morning celebration. All these things I went through made me stop and think about those with similar stories. Those who have the same struggles.

I heard stories from friends that didn’t celebrate Christmas but still had the same experiences during the major holiday they celebrated. It gave me perspective. Sometimes I get called a bleeding-heart liberal for my views. That’s fine by me. My experiences and listening to the stories of others made me see there is more that we have in common than we don’t. Being alone at Christmas one year, I realized there were people who were also alone. In a sense, we weren’t really alone. That brought me comfort to a point.

And what is my point exactly? Well, my point is that there are nearly 8 billion people on the planet. Many of them have similar experiences to our own. We should all take the time to realize we are all human. Our religious beliefs might be different but that doesn’t mean others are beneath us. I guess what I am trying to say is we should use this time of year as a template for the rest of the year. We should spread kindness and understanding, not fear and hatred. Life is too short for all that.

I would also challenge all those who read this to reach out to those you might not do so often. Just saying hello can make someone feel less alone in the world. I think in the end we should all just try to be better people. I know this world would be much better if we tried that a little more than fighting.

So, with that, I will step off my soap box and simply say happy holidays. No matter what holiday it is you celebrate.

-Robin Alura

Let’s talk about Social Media

 

Here we are again friends. This time I wanted to talk about a very polarizing topic, social media. There are those who love it and those who can’t stand it and a bunch of us in the middle of those. The concept of social media is very simple. It is a network designed to let people from all over the world connect based on common interests and share their points of views and opinions. Sounds great, right? Well, it hasn’t exactly worked out that way.

In its infancy, social media was a limited thing. There were not a lot of people who were using it. I’m reminded of the days of MySpace, an early social media platform. When you asked most people about if they were on there, most people had no idea what it was or even how to use it. It was a very solid concept. Friends could find you and stay up to date with everything you were doing. How much they knew was totally determined by how much you shared.

I never posted much on the old platform. I never needed to. At the risk of sounding very old, I still believed if someone wanted to know what was going on with me, they should pick up the phone and call me or stop by my apartment to hang out. I didn’t see much value in sharing photos or status posts. I honestly thought it was going to die out and just fade away. I mean I was already connecting (and being pissed off at) people from around the world during my time as an online gamer, also still in its infancy. Then Facebook came along.

That is when social media really began to appeal to the masses. Why? Hell, if I know. It was the same thing except in a prettier package and without people competing for a space on your main page (which was a dumb thing anyway). Facebook gave rise to an entire industry of companies who created social media platforms. Instagram, Twitter, and a bunch of little known or more specialized social platforms began to spring up. People were connecting in ways they never had before.

People in America could connect with people in Japan and bond over epic animated shows. People in France could connect with people in Mexico based on their music preferences. People in Brazil could connect with people in Portugal over their ancestry. It seemed like everything was great. People had a way to share their views on everything from politics to muffins. Everyone’s voice could find others like it. No longer was the one goth girl living in a rural town in the middle of Oklahoma alone. She could connect with others who were just like her in situations just like her.

That is exactly what the inventors of social media wanted. Well, that and to make some money off their invention like anyone else living in a capitalist society. The truth is, while that does still happen, there have been things about social media that negatively impacted our society. The biggest of these is an addiction to social media. We all heard the phrase “doom scrolling”. The act of just scrolling through tons and tons of social media posts to the point that you really don’t even register what you are looking at. That is what most people are doing. If you go out and watch people in public settings, a lot of them are staring at their phones and scrolling through their social media. Completely oblivious to the wonders of the world around them.

There is a programmed idea that if we are not looking at social media, we will miss something important. Yet, half the time, all we see is people sharing pictures of the food they are about to consume. This leads to information overload. There is so much information, both important and trivial, that our brains literally can’t process it all. This can cause us to miss something important.

The way information is presented can also be an issue. Many people, especially younger generations, have become accustomed to getting information in smaller segments. Data has shown that a lot of Gen Z individuals don’t follow links that lead to longer stories about any sort of topics. To many, if it’s not in these bite sized pieces, then its not worth knowing. And yet, as a society, we see more and more people using social media as their primary source of news and information. This can be a problem when you have complex concepts to explain like tariffs and immigration. It is extremely difficult to make something bite sized when it’s incredibly complicated.

That then leads to something that is so incredibly difficult to deal with, misinformation. News outlets, in theory, are held accountable for what they say. If they give the wrong information or straight up just lie, there is usually a consequence. Journalism is supposed to be unbiased. Social media has no restrictions. Anyone can say anything they want. People can make all kinds of claims on social media and there is little recourse for those actions.

Once that wildfire starts, it’s nearly impossible to stop. We see this everyday in the spreading of rhetoric about immigrants and transgender people. We see it in posts by government officials spreading false facts about our economy. We see it by governments posting information to impact elections in other countries. And there is no clear-cut way to deal with this since those who want to spread this kind of misinformation will find ways around things such as bans and blocks.

The last point I want to make in this blog is about the worst thing about social media. We all have opinions, and they are all valid. However, not all of these opinions should have a platform to be heard. Social media has given rise to increases in things such as racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, and Islamophobia. There has also been increases in intolerance, hate speech, and even death threats. And none of it is based in reality or has any real reason behind it except for the fact that someone has hatred in their heart.

This is also difficult to combat. There is an argument on how this is protected by certain rights granted to users by the government. However, the data shows how harmful the continuing of this behavior becomes. Even I have been subjected to random strangers who don’t agree with me or are somehow think they are affected by my gender identity encouraging me to commit suicide as some sort of act of compassion for society.

This leaves people with a choice to make. With the plethora of social media platforms, do we simply move from one to the other? That is a real possibility. However, the danger is that we create an echo chamber, whether intentionally or not. Having only, one sides view doesn’t help. Informed opinions and intelligence only come from listening to both perspectives. But that doesn’t mean we should simply look at someone who is wishing death upon us as another point of view. Hate and bigotry are all rooted in impulsiveness and irrational ideology. There is absolutely nothing logical about it in any way despite what one side may say.

I think, in the end, we must limit ourselves. We miss so much around us so much when we are looking at our feeds. I don’t deny that some good comes from social media. I met my best friend on social media. I found a supporting community on social media. These things helped me in ways I can’t even describe. However, I feel that a tipping point is coming for social media. With so many using it for ways it was never intended to be used and spreading messages that go against the ideas of hope, unity, and freedom, I think its only a matter of time before social media begins its descent into history and is remembered that while it showed some a bright light, it also showed how dark the human race can be as well.

-Robin Alura

Let’s talk about History

 

History is an important subject. It shows us where we have been as a civilization. It has shed light on important people who have shaped what has become our modern world. It is the story of what was and an indication of what will be. As the old saying goes, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. If that is the case and history does repeat itself, I’m getting a dinosaur!

Joking aside, I think it’s important we talk about history. There are many sayings about it. The one I put in the previous paragraph is one of the most famous but there is another that is equally true. History is written by the victors. And it truly is. What we see as moments of right and wrong in history are shaped by those presenting them.

When I was in high school, we were studying the Second World War in history class. The atrocities of the Holocaust were told to us, not in great detail but enough to make us understand how awful the events were. And they were awful. So many lost their lives simply because they were themselves and some dick head with a God complex decided he didn’t like them. However, when we studied the end of the war, particularly the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, it was shown as a patriotic and humane way to bring the war to an end.

But…was it? Over 6 million people died during the Holocaust. Nearly 85 million people died in the entirety of the war. Almost 150,000 of those were from dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet, we as American school kids were supposed to see this as acceptable. I remember hearing about it and being horrified by such a loss of life in just 2 separate instances. I had to keep all that inside but the idea that we should glorify that mean people dying just seemed wrong.

I use this example for a reason. To show how those who write history can shape it to justify almost anything. I believe if the Nazis had won, the Holocaust would have been seen as a great and wonderful undertaking to make the world better. The horrors and lives lost during that would have been forgotten and even looked down upon. However, it’s not the only way to shape history.

History changes constantly. What we thought we knew back in the 80s and 90s isn’t necessarily true anymore. There is evidence that Vikings may have come to North America long before Christopher Columbus. There is evidence that some of the Inca civilization settled in parts of Florida. These new discoveries challenge what we thought we knew. But there is a more active erasing of history that is starting to take place in our world.

In recent years, we have seen a push by partisan lawmakers to ban certain subjects that really shed light on all of the different aspects of history. We have seen foreign political leaders deny horrific events, such as the Holocaust, even happened. We have seen religious zealots go out of their way to destroy ancient archaeological sites in war torn countries in the Middle East. The complete removing of statues of historical figures instead of correcting the monuments to show both the good and bad of these individuals.

This is not a new phenomenon in our modern culture. There is evidence in ancient Egypt of pharaohs erasing their predecessors from great temples and literature. The ancient Romans did the same when then conquered Alexandria and Greece. At some point, in every great culture and society throughout human existence, has tried to erase and rewrite the history of their civilizations.

This creates a paradox of sorts. Remember that old saying about repeating history? Well, it’s hard to not repeat it when there are active campaigns to erase it. That is why it’s important not to just preserve history but to teach it properly. That means both the good and bad. It’s important to teach that people we have put up on pedestals as heroes are not the valiant champions of right, we are told. An example of this is General Custer. In my school days he was seen as a revered individual who died while fighting the savages during the expansion of our great nation. Truth is Custer was kind of a bastard. He was a very flawed man. Those “savages” were fighting for their very existence. To them, Caucasians were invading their homes and destroying their culture.

History is filled with good and bad. Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world and is heralded as a great man but in order to reach that milestone, he did a lot of bad things. We were taught that the Great Pyramids were built by slave labor. This is a convenient twisting of history to fit a religious context but it’s not the actual truth. We have to acknowledge both sides in order to truly learn from history and grow.

Most people today have no idea how modern conflicts have started in some of the hot spots of the world. The current conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians stems from a long history that very few know and even fewer are taught. However, supporters of either side are quickly drawn into a right versus wrong debate. History is what helps us see beyond the absolutes and get a clear understanding of each other’s cultures.

With a rise in authoritarianism and current military conflicts on the rise, history is more important than ever. History keeps fascism in check. It prevents megalomaniacs from dominating the world. It prevents the extermination of people for being who they are. History matters. History leads to understanding. Understanding leads to peace. Peace leads to community. In the end, we are all on this planet together. Erasing history only serves to doom us all.

I will end this post with this thought. It’s up to all of us to learn from history. To question what we are taught as the truth and seek answers from all perspectives. Read everything. Not just what we are told to read but the things were are told not to. Knowledge is power and limiting access to knowledge is a weapon of the corrupt. It’s up to us to make sure this weapon isn’t used against us. It’s up to us to make sure we all have this power. History is the key to either a path to a golden age or to absolute destruction. History, in its complete context, matters.

-Robin Alura