Over the weekend, I looked at the news and saw this: My first reaction wasn’t to automatically assume President Trump let fire a racist tweet. My first reaction was what everyone’s should be: to read the tweets and see what they really said. So I looked and found this: He didn’t mention race. But every news outlet did. Every single news site I saw, CNN, Salon, Vox, New York Magazine, MSNBC, etc. referred either to a “racist tweet,” or Elijah Cummings as a “black Congressman.” But why stop at “black Congressman.” Why not add “tall,” or “bald,” or “68-year-old?”…
People always fill in the blanks (and are almost always wrong)
Perspective comes with age, and one observation that has become clearer as I’ve gotten older is that in absence of knowledge, people will fill in the gaps. And they will almost always be wrong. The current President Trump Twitter storm is just the latest example. On Sunday, July 14th, President Trump sent the following three tweets: Technically speaking, only a few hundred thousand people read the tweets. That means most of the people talking about it have gotten their information from either a news outlet, or word of mouth (friends, relatives, overhearing conversations, etc.) I first heard about these…