Do you see enough to see it all? Of course not. You don’t even see all that you think you see. Much more than we like to admit, our witness is second or third hand. We did not see, they saw. Yet, we take what they saw as if we saw it ourselves. We transform third or second hand sightings into personal observations, allowing them to inform our words and actions.
This sophistry is stupid and dangerous, larger than the loss of all the Lemmings lost to the sea.
What do you see? What have you heard? Return to the first person, yourself, in person. Judge life from there. Even there, with first hand knowledge, you still are an imperfect judge, but a better judge presumably.
News, fake or not, is vastly second hand. It is rarely good. The way it is dished up to us, it is instilling little more than anxiety and fear. When you think about how you feel after listening to the news, you might begin to wonder why you watch it anymore. Why does it have such mood swaying, depressing power over us?
Resolve to See for yourself.
The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.
John Berger