A Plea for Sanity: Buy a Book

Before the internet there was a wonderful invention called a book. When we needed to know the meaning of a word we looked it up in a dictionary. We could learn about history and the people who populated it in an encyclopedia.

Oh... there's an online encyclopedia for that today? Well those encyclopedias we used were written by people studied in their particular fields, not by Billy Joe Jim Bob Jr. who gets his facts from a bathroom stall.

The internet used to be called the information superhighway, but has more realistically become the misinformation superhighway. Somebody starts a rumor and before the internet when we were kids we could ask our parents if it was true. Somebody starts a rumor online and people gobble it up and accept it as fact, pell mell.

What got me thinking about this was the latest definition floating around the internet about the word "tag" meaning "touch and go". Look it up in a dictionary and you will not see that as a definition. But you will see it floating around online as though it is fact, even though you can just go to the page about it on Snopes to get the lowdown on this latest internet misinformation.

I just wonder where we are headed as a generation brought up on the internet. Our parents would tell us not to get into cars with strangers... and today there is Uber. Somebody would write about someone giving good head on a bathroom stall... and today there is Facebook. And of course with Fox News and a compulsive liar for a president facts just aren't what they used to be.

If you want to know something about a car you ask a mechanic. If you're concerned about your health you go to a doctor. If you want to know about poverty and homelessness you sure as hell don't ask a rich person. But the age old warning of not accepting candy from strangers has faded, and the internet is filled with candy and almost all of it from strangers.

For goodness sake. Don't take your advice from Facebook, Twitter and fools. Look it up. Find it for yourself. A good place to start is in a book or a library... not a bathroom stall.

Fletch