100 Days of Gladness: Day 29
Critical Thinking: Complex Quiet in the Screaming World of Soundbites
I don’t usually associate the word “gladness” with political issues. Much less issues mired in age old, intractable conflicts. But here I am, feeling it. Gladness. Or, something gladness adjacent, at least.
As our world teeters on the brink of WWIII, it’s so easy to land where Tik Tok wants us: Israel is bad or Hamas is bad. Before I read Thomas L. Friedman’s piece in the New York Times, I was very sympathetic to the college campus protests. I thought, “Yes. This is the young people speaking out against injustice, like we did in the sixties against the Vietnam war.”
But that was knee-jerk reaction. I was not thinking for myself, or curious in any way about enlarging my perspective. I just thought genocide is wrong (which it is), and left it at that. But let me share two quotes from that Friedman article that made me glad for the nudge toward more critical thinking:
He says, at one point, “My view: Hamas was ready to sacrifice thousands of Gazan civilians to win the support of the next global generation on TikTok. And it worked. But one reason it worked was a lack of critical thinking by too many in that generation — the result of a campus culture that has become way too much about what to think and not…
