Even though Texas is mostly conservatives and has some of the top universities in the United States, it still has lots of uneducated and lots of liberal citizens. Recently, we have had an increasing amount of drama on the steps of our state capital. In the capital city especially, there are a plethora of people that overreact and believe that their first speculations are the facts. Due to these people, that don’t take the time to investigate the rumors and because of the help of the media, things get out of control and people get misinformed.
Don’t get me wrong, I like for people to voice their opinion, especially if they feel that there is something bothering them. However, I feel that if they are going to voice their opinion, they should take the time to do a little research and not assume that because the clouds are dark, that it is going to rain.
Texas state and local governments are being affected by the medial coverage of protesters rather than the bill itself. Lots of the important news never makes it to the air and the majority of the citizens never known what’s really going on with their petitions that they send to the capital.
I am worried the new generation of Texas citizens, which are going to be running our government in the near future, are not going to know how to make legitimate arguments, but rather act on impulse, making them less effective leaders.
A recent example of protesters fueling other protesters was the protests against the abortion bill. A lot of citizens disagreed with what they heard about the bill and went to protest, what they were protesting which was not even what the bill was about was heard by others who joined in on the protest. Rather than reading the signs of protesters, people should have done a little research of their own and found out what the bill was really about before joining the protest, that way they had hard evidence of what they were protesting. Too many people are spreading misinformed information and it needs to stop so we can move bills through our governments more efficiently.
1 comment:
My commentary is on the blog post “Blog #5 Texas State and Local Government”. This blog’s driving point seems to be a concern that protesters fail to engage their critical thinking skills before engaging in protests at the capital and that they are just being riled up by media coverage. The author does not provide their name, but from their profile information I find that they consider themselves a staunch conservative and are studying Agriculture at Texas A&M.
I found his commentary level headed and reasonable, with little to no inflammatory language. He seems to have a genuine concern for his topic, and quite frankly I agree with almost all of his post. I would say his target audience is probably conservatives, but I can see almost anybody from any stance agreeing with him. The only blatant political leaning was in the example he used where he specifically targeted people opposing the bill. From what I can remember, there were protesters from both sides of the debate that were there protesting, and to single one out as being more ignorant of the topic than the other is shortsighted.
One of the underlying tones of the post that I found a tad naive is the thought that these kinds of protests are something new. I would argue that if you take the time to look back on history you’ll see that this is anything but out of the ordinary and that our lack of protests in recent years is actually what is out of the ordinary and in fact more worrying. I was personally ecstatic that people finally felt impassioned enough to get off their couches and go make them selves heard. I wish more people would get this involved on topics other than the few that the media decides to cover. Even if they are not that knowledgeable to begin with, the act of being involved will often times produce self education.
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