Two articles showed up in my Facebook news feed today, glaringly juxtaposed.
The first is a nearly five year old article about Columbine. It’s about how most of us don’t know the true story of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. It details how misinformation about the killers and premature speculation about why they did what they did still affects how we view the incident today. The story helps explain how the mixture of modern reporting capabilities, combined with rampant social media, skew our immediate perceptions and warp our long term memories of episodes like this.
You can read that article here: 10 years later, the real story behind Columbine.
The second is a blog post about one teacher and how, on the day after Columbine, she changed the way she both interacts with her students and how she manipulates their interactions with each other in an effort to proactively work against the human power hierarchies that contribute to these rare, but horrific, events. She's using math to direct love.
You can read that blog post here: Momastery Blog Post
I took a couple things away from this combination:
1. The information age approach to codifying and deciphering emergency (and even non-emergency) situations, in the heat of the moment, needs to be carefully considered as we start passing information around that might or might not be accurate, that might or might not have been verified, that might or might not have been researched. The effect of spreading “knowledge” this way has the potential to make us all liars. We participate in the negative impact on our collective ability to create accurate societal/historical memories.
2. The only truly effective way to combat evil is through human interaction. Love wins. Sadly, it requires effort most of us do not want to put forth.
That’s a lot for 8:00AM on the last day of the first month of a new year. Time to go grab a second cup of coffee.
