September 19, 2009

Everyone needs to think before they speak.

In the last three weeks there’s been a series of stupid things blurted out in public by various prominent Americans.

First, Joe Wilson yells “you lie” at President Obama during a joint session of Congress. Ridiculous, I know. Isn’t there some sort of procedure to verbally assault the president of The United States of America on live television?

Second, Kanye West drunkenly stumbles on stage during the presentation of “Best Music Video” award to Taylor Swift at the MTV movie awards and slurs out “I'm sorry, but BeyoncĂ© had one of the best videos of all time” C’mon Kanye, this isn’t one of your video girls, treat Taylor with at least a marginal amount of respect.

Third, upon hearing of Kanye’s tirade against Swift, President Barack Obama is heard by ABC news staffers calling Kanye a “Jackass”. Et tu Obama? Your better than that!

Besides being extremely entertaining, these events are all extremely indicative of the times we now live. With the proliferation of information technology and advancement of social networking we now live in a society where real time feedback dominates. Twitter: people transmit there thoughts and feelings on an hourly basis. Blogging: people get a thought in their heads and instantly jump on their computers to tell the world. Literally seconds elapse from thought formation to the proliferation of the information. There’s no second thoughts, no censorship, just information blurted out. Wilson, Kanye and Obama did not think before they spoke. People the world over do not think before they blog.

We as a society need to slow down and think before we say and write things. We cannot afford to blurt out everything that comes to our mind. With that, before I post this, I think I’m gonna sleep on it and make sure this is really what I want the world to read.