Memes: Don't Believe Everything You Hear or Read and Only Half of What You See.

Just a reminder to please not get caught up in anything, or share anything, especially inflammatory, before applying further educational investigation. Don't forget that news articles, even from the past, may be used to control people's thinking and do not always write the truth. We should all know this by now and be politely educating anyone about it, as my father did with me when I was a teen. He advised me: don't believe everything you hear or read and only half of what you see.

 

Wise words to live by. 

 

Now, onto the reason behind this blog. A friend of mine shared on Facebook what she said was a lying meme, regarding Abraham Lincoln, and advised it was done to incite hate. She wisely shared a website to debunk that meme and reinforced her statement through intelligent education.

 

Wise woman. 

 

Yet, at times, I've noticed on her posts, as in other's posts, things to rectify an error miss the mark, based on comments that I've seen. They apparently didn't read everything and just jumped on the thing that struck out in their mind and harped on that instead. People seem to be in too much of a hurry anymore. Slow down, take the time to read everything someone has posted before commenting, you may be smarter for it.

 

Also, because of her post, I found it humorously appropriate to share a picture on my blog of a meme with Abraham Lincoln on it, which advises people to be careful. You would be surprised in how many innocent people could be duped by this meme, thinking it to be real, because of not being educated enough to know about Abraham Lincoln and that he didn't have Internet back in his time. 

 

After all, not everyone on the Internet lives in the USA or knows its history, in fact, not everyone living in the USA does either. They might consider it as factual data. This same thing applies to memes to incite hate through lies. 

 

I see this much too often; people sharing false memes to represent some, supposedly, historical subject to create negativity ... instead of really educating people. Those past situations may not have any connection to what people need today and are only used to feed into someone's current discontent in order to favor another's cause.

 

Sadly, I see many websites doing the same thing with their, "remember the Alamo" mentality. I don't mind remembering any past, history can be interesting, as long as it's done to help us understand and not illicit more trouble. Even if we do discuss these negative past situations, it should be used to educate and not inflame hate riots.

 

My question, regarding things of this nature, is why keep bringing any history up over and over again, especially to create anger in others from the way it's done? We don't live in the past. To me, using the past to hate is like how I feel about people's opinions of me.

 

Is it going to pay my bills?

 

No?

 

Why give it attention?

 

Obviously, it's not helping us to move on either if it's just stirring the hate pot around us. We must remember that, generally, these are mean spirited beings, unhappy with their lives, and are doing all they can to bring people down into their miserable state. It's like they can't find enough problems going on around the world to gripe about ... which there's plenty of it out there ... let's throw past history in it and use that to stir up trouble too.

 

Why?

 

Will it change the past?

 

No?

 

Then why do it? 

 

I think of history as a tool to hopefully teach us to be better humans and not be the same of what we were back then ... which is why we can't move on when memes are created to deliberately stir up hate. It only tells me we haven't learned diddly-squat with that type of mentality and we probably won't ever learn if we keep allowing ourselves to be pulled back into it ... over and over and over again.

We become part of a vicious circle of hate begetting hate.

 

Get the picture?

 

Programming carried over and over again because no one wants to allow peace of mind due to the "look at what you did to us in the past" mentality.

If we don't block those thoughts of hate, who will? There are no walls within the mind world ... only our will to shield it, to educate it, to learn from it and to move on from it whenever possible.

 

Other than learning to read emotions,  communications, compromise, and cooperation are the keys to resolving issues. I understand we can't move on until we can move beyond what's holding us down or back but hate and ignorance certainly isn't getting the job done, much less spreading rumors. History has already shown us this doesn't work. So, why do we keep allowing it?

 

     Maybe it's easier to believe lies?

 

          Maybe it's easier to be stupid?

 

               Maybe it's easier to hate?

                    Maybe it's easier to be led astray?