Christian Fletcher, Period 1, 11/13/2023

Christian Fletcher


Period 1, Blog #2


11/4/23


Socio-political consciousness


CHOOSE a topic below and discuss your thoughts and feelings: Current events that incite strong feelings in you.


A topic that has incited very strong feelings within me recently is the media. I find it insane how you can pay the media to advertise any perspective of which you want. Specifically I am talking about the Palestinian - Israeli conflict. It takes a good amount of digging to see both sides of the story, but on the main media you only see the Israeli perspective. Once you do your research you can find that the conquering of Palestine by Israel started in 1917 when the British established a national home for Jewish people in Palestine. Followed by policies like the British Mandate allowing more Jews to immigrate to Palestine increasing tensions between them and the Arabs. Back to current times though, if we can see all this history and how Palestine has been taken over by the Jewish why is it that only the conquerors side is being pushed to the main media. It almost reminds me of the documents we looked at in APUSH where Native Americans were depicted as animals and savages to garner support for Europeans trying to excuse their displacement of Native Americans into reservations. I see almost a similar situation in Palestine where the Jewish have been displaced palestinian families for years and now they get to bomb and attack those areas in which they were sent while still being able to play victim. I am not condoning either side as I do not support war because only the innocent get hurt anyway, but what I see is an attacker and a victim and while the victim gets no support the attacker gets huge police backed protests all over the city. I am now seeing more of a change as protesters have almost forced the media to publicize both sides of the story. At the end of the day I wish there was a way to end it all because of innocent people and children becoming hostages, being murdered, and losing family members.


How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others?

When I was younger I always believed the media. As I have gotten older I have learned to do my own research on topics that I am actually interested in before I make assumptions about a situation strictly on what the news is feeding me. Simply because despite the fact that even though the news is supposed to be unbiased the media is very biased and portray whatever perspective they want to. If you watch multiple news channels you can almost see the difference between how they tell news. I think that a lot of people nowadays have nothing to go off of except for what they see on social media or on the news depending on what generation they are in. Which makes a lot of individual sheep almost. You can and can't blame people at the same time, the Palestinian vs Israeli situation definitely made that clear to me as some people would state an opinion than when I asked them to back it up they had nothing then I took my time out to educate them on the situation and their entire opinion changed. At the same time you really don't know what sources to believe, maybe I could have the wrong opinion even though I checked multiple sources. I’ve learned to always listen to both sides no matter the situation before formulating an opinion.