Fucking Do Your Homework — by JC Staff

I’m prefacing what I’m about to say with this: I am not perfect.
In fact, I am the furthest from perfect of just about every person I know.
I get parking fines, I am late picking my children up, I lose keys and phones with complete reliability, I forget to pay bills, I leave my clothes on the floor.
I could go on. Yeah. You get the drift.
That said, I read. I read a lot. I read online, too. A lot. I use social media, and I like to make sure, damn sure, my opinions are well-researched.
The world is a fast place. It’s spinning quicker that it seemed to when we were kids.
We are all “swamped”, “snowed under” and “bogged down”; I get it, believe me.
Work, marriage, motherhood – I’m busy, too. But do you know what?
People are getting lazier.
These days, we all have instant access to more information than our grandparents, with their shelves proudly full of Encyclopedia Britannica, could have ever dreamt of.
Our phones are the portal to an infinite amount of detail on any subject we choose.
Google is now actually a verb, as well as a noun.
But some of us, for some reason, unfathomably cannot be bothered.
Some have their opinions on the tip of their tongue, and let them slide instantly out of the tip of their finger onto their smartphone’s surface, without a millisecond’s pause for thought.
There they sit, with a self-righteously satisfied sigh, dusting their hands off “that’s that”-style, having “put someone straight” about something.
No thought given to clarifying what the person had said, or whether they have misinterpreted it, or even if their response to it is actually correct.
Sometimes, it might be worth not even commenting. Yes, you do still have the option to keep your opinions to yourself.
Like when people yell at the TV, but no one on the TV can hear them. That.
It seems on social media, hiding at home where no one can see them, people feel freer to comment on anything and everything, with whatever lack of civility they wish.
Worst of all, some people comment without having read the background, the thread, the hyperlink, or read up on the person they are responding to.
They spend no energy taking time to read around the subject.
Three times this week, strangers replied to me directly on social media in response to things I had written about. Each time, the respondent was snide and evasive.
Smug is not a good look on anyone, seriously.
And guess what?
Each one was coming from an uninformed standpoint.
People. Come on. Do you think you know what you are talking about?
You spout misjudgements, you cause hurt and distress, you often don’t know who you are really talking to, and what their life or career is about.
Frighteningly, you are also planting the seeds of another 5 minutes of hatred in a world that already has more than enough of its noxious vines strangling the human race.
So, I ask you to stop. Stop; think; read. Check the subject out, verify the claims you make.
Be certain about what you are about to type.
Know your game – because that matters.
Do your homework, people.
Fucking do your homework.