It's a midweek day afternoon and you're bored out of your skull. What do you do? Well, you log onto social media of course! What's the first thing we see when we log onto social media? Time after time you'll see clickbait, which is content specifically tailored to get you to click on it. A great deal of clickbait is fabricated news that should be tossed out with all the other garbage online. However, sometimes we don't know its false information because of how well written it seems to be, with properly formatted sentences, proper grammar, and often statistics that seem to make sense. Another name for this type of journalism is yellow journalism, which is writing that is exaggeratory and sensational in order to attract viewers.
I often see articles blaming groups of individuals for a variety of different things that we have no control over. For example "Millenials are killing Facebook" or "Baby Boomers have destroyed the housing market". These articles appeal to those people who can't help but want to blame all of their problems on other people because they just can't seem to get what they want, and this goes for ALL generations. These articles are riddled with negative comments from people ranging from 18 to 98, blaming everyone else but themselves.
So did millennials really ruin Facebook, the handshake, cursive writing, beer, or shopping malls? Probably not. Did baby boomers ruin the housing market, the environment, taxes, or railroads? Probably not.
So what do we do and who do we blame, you ask? We blame no one. These articles are designed to polarize all of us and bring us further away from each other. Society is continuing to become a negative, angry, and incouragible place and these blatantly arrogant articles do nothing to repair what has already been done.
We aren't so different from each other as we may think. We all live on this beautiful planet trying to make a great life for us and those we care about. Our only differences lie in how we've experienced our time here on Earth. Every generation has a different way of doing things that we think is the right way, and we need to respect our differences. If we don't work together and cooperate, we can never begin to repair what has happened on this planet. Let's stop playing the blame game and just accept one another for what we are.
If you just can't seem to accept that people are different, then don't say anything at all or at least not to others faces.
"We cannot accomplish all we need to do without working together." - Bill Richardson
