The 2024 Election: What do President Biden and Former President Trump Say About Us?

   As a child, I was always told to treat others how I wanted to be treated. This philosophy certainly seems foreign to our society during election time. With social media getting more advanced, the meme and video advocates of a party are taking a no-holds-barred approach to showing why their party is the right one to choose and how the other one would be a ridiculous choice. 

       Now historically, this is just a more modern approach to being politically active. The techniques being used are not new but are able to be created and distributed faster than ever before. They even have a tendency to be rude and are designed to reach all age groups, including our children. No matter what political ideology you belong to, we cannot be happy with the way the current political landscape has affected our children.  How do we tell our children to act with compassion when their adult leaders and party activists behave the worst?

     We tell our children to be open to all points of view and to be compassionate. They are to discuss their feelings and work with their peers to come up with an agreeable solution. How do we enforce this belief when compassion is only shown when it is politically advantageous by most of our media outlets? It’s okay to want to win, but we need to strongly consider the cost of what we do to get it. 

     The act of ridiculing those who are different from us to get what we want is not the lesson we want our children to receive. It is no wonder there are issues in our schools with how students treat one another. Society is setting a horrible example with only ourselves to blame. 

    Children are often taught to back up their assertions with facts. When I was a child, prior to the advent of the internet, we had sources that were agreeable by most to be accurate. Today, unless you are collecting and calculating the data yourself, you have a hard time believing the data reports due to the fear of being manipulated to agree with the presenter’s political desires. There are very few, if any, sources our children can go to for impartial information. With parts of studies being shown in short form media, our young people will be taking truth from statistics that are difficult to analyze due to their lack of transparency.  Let’s face it, as attention spans decrease, our children may not even feel like checking to see if the data is right. Our politicians know this and use data to lure our children to their side. When you add the message with modern day social media hooks, you end up creating a young society that is easily manipulated. You can say even ruled by computers that are being controlled by an evil operator. We need to find a way to stop this trend from happening. However, it’s almost impossible to stop the speed of this type of information unless sanctions are administered which are very hard to obtain. 

  What does this say about us that we let this happen? We didn’t start the fire, but we sure kept the fire burning into the modern age. We allow our political parties to treat candidates like gods, ridicule opponents, and stomp on those different from them. Our children see these actions and attempt to replicate them. What does this say about us or the future we are leaving for our children? It is my hope that our children become better receivers of information by improving their analytical techniques and not allow solely emotion to dictate their decision making process. Nonetheless, history shows that most people fail at this task. We can say we didn’t start the fire, but we cannot deny we made it bigger. Hopefully, our children can be a lot smarter and rescue us.