There's a lot of excitement in the air about the 2012 election. Everywhere you go it seems that there is some sort of conversation or propaganda concerning the race for presidency. There are accusations from both sides concerning the opposition. Just recently I recieved a flyer in the mail that pinned Obama for not showing his birth certificate and other negative sides of him. I already get enough of these negatives through my mom. Her veiw of Obama is anything but good.
She believes that Obama is a Socialistic freak and that he's going to take control over the country through the use of the government. She's convinced that he is going to destroy what america stands for by implementing a series of laws that are going to give him total dictatorship. Now of course when I hear this, I think that there's no way. The constitution and the millions of people that live in this country won't let that happen.
But that doesn't give my mom any comfort. She says she hears all over the news and articles that she reads that Obama is the exact opposite of what this country needs. She hears that he's going to implant chips into our bodies that have all our medical info on them and tracking devices. That the government will be able to, in a few years, refrain you from recieving the surgery or other medical procedure that you desperately need. I've asked her where she is hearing all this and she says FOX news and other sites on the web. When I heard that I thought to myself that those were actually legit sources.
I don't have enough free time to follow the debates or the race thouroghly enough to tell my mom she was wrong. Working a 4 hour week plus being a part time student doesn't allow much flexibility. But I had to do something.
So I did my own little bit of research. I went to reddit.com, a forum site that millions of users go to for entertainment, news, and other interesting facts through the use of subreddits. Subreddits are just a term used to describe a category that the subreddit is about. I posted in political disscussion. you can read the post here. I told the community my situation and described what my mom has been saying and let the internet do the rest. The next day I looked at my post and the feedback I recieved was immense.
Some comments were a page long while others just straight up said my mom was a moron. The majority of the comments were asking me what my mom's sources were and that all of the comments she has been saying were absurd. When I replied FOX news was her source, I instantly obtained comments saying that was my problem.
Now I'm not saying that what anybody on an online forum has to say is completely 100% true either. A lot of them didn't have sources and the few that did had shady ones. Hell, it could even be that the majority of people on reddit are Obama followers. But one of the only thoughts rolling through my head at that moment was, "Is FOX news really that unreliable of a source? Is that what this country has come to? That the news isn't really truthful?"
I havn't told my mom yet about the post to reddit or that she is wrong. Everybody is allowed their opinion. All I know is that this campaign race is really stressing me out. Not because I'm personally worried about the debates or the country, but with the ammount of slander and satire in the atmosphere, it's hard to decide what is fact and what is fiction. To decipher the code you would have to ask the runners themselves, and even they might not give the correct answer in order to cover their own asses. It's sending my mom into a whirling ball of chaos and I'm hoping that America will choose the right president through the clouds of accusations and fiction.
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