I have been following the story of Shirley Sherrod and it has truly been a sad situation. A lady who seemed to be trying to do the right things and do her job has lost that job. Now, many people are apologetic. In situations like this, it’s always easy to point to race issues as the cause. But racism isn’t always the underlying issue.
I look at two other factors. Today, our political climate seems to be such that we are always looking to take advantage of situations to benefit our Party. Instead of being “politically correct”, we are looking for “political gain.” So much so, that it doesn’t always matter what the facts really are; it becomes how we can present those facts to benefit our viewpoint.
The second factor is the media. There used to be a time you could watch the news and be fairly certain you were hearing unbiased, factual reporting. Now, we have so many news outlets that are all in a hurry to have the news first even at the expense of getting all the facts. I’ve seen it often in sports reporting and it’s spilling over into our news as well.
I believe the lesson in all this is that we can’t jump to conclusions based on what is reported to us in the news anymore. We have to slow down and try to get all the facts before we form an opinion. Unfortunately, we can no longer watch the news (or sports) and believe we are always getting the whole story.
