One of the first things I do every morning is check the news, browse the headlines and click on a few things to read. I love readings about global affairs (historic and current), I love reading stories about people. I read at least one article a day. This helps me form intelligent opinions, think of out the box, and most importantly just connect with the world. We are one with the world; even if events on another continent don't affect you directly, knowing about it does not take anything away from you.
I'd like to share with you some of the articles I've read this year that I enjoyed/found very interesting. Of course I don't remember ALL of them, but these are the few that I still remember having come across. I'll share the links too, so you can read the full thing too in case you're interested 😉
1) Should We Execute Dylann Roof? by David Langness
I didn't know about Dylann Roof until I read this article. Last year (at the age of 21) he entered a church and shot nine people who were praying - all of whom were "African Americans". People call this a "hate crime" because his sole motive was racist. Anyways, this article was really moving for me. In the beginning it showed all the reasons he should be executed. I mean, why not? He killed nine people just because they were "black", who hadn't done anything wrong to him, and who were in the midst of worshipping. BUT not everyone thinks he should face the death penalty. And you know who some of those people are? The family/relatives of some of those victims/people he shot; they prefer to forgive him. The article also shares the Bahá'i perspective on capital punishment.
2) Masih Alinejad's My Stealthy Freedom
This is more of a video than a write-up. I watched Masih's speech at the European Parliament's panel on the Burkini ban and that's how I got to learn about her campaign. Here's a link to the summary of the speech - she basically said it was hypocrisy for female European politicians to campaign against the wearing burqas on the beaches in European countries, but visit Iran (where they are forced to wear the veil) and not say anything about the compulsory hijab over there. I found her approach really brilliant - so female politicians go to Iran and wear the veils because they have to, but then they're trying to stop the Muslim women in European countries from wearing the veils, even on the beach, when they do so because they say that's the law of their religion. You can visit her blog here to see more about her campaign.
3) BREXIT was a big part of 2016. Not long after majority of the people of Britain voted out of the European Union, there was regret in the air. I personally believe that this is because most people were ill-informed of what the referendum was really about. I remember doing A LOT of reading myself to fully understand what this was about/ why it was happening/ what it would mean for the future, etc. Here's an article on the New York Times that I found really helpful.
4) Fake News. Speaking of being ill-informed, the other BIG story of 2016 was the US Elections. One candidate said that the media painted him in a bad light, the other candidate said she didn't get enough of the light. Mark Zuckerberg had to personally address the issue that the circulation of illegitimate stories on facebook contributed to the winning of Donald Trump. I've personally seen a lot of these "fake news" items - I know I am able to tell if they're fake or not, sometimes I google the headlines to see if it pops up on other websites too, and sometimes I can just tell from the name like this one time I saw an article shared by Da1lyMail. At first, I read it as Daily Mail, even their logo was the same! Until I noticed the 1 instead of i. Surprisingly these articles garner thousands of likes an shares, making them look legitimate and then a lot of people fall into this trap. This was something I personally realized even before Zuckerberg's post. Here's a very informative article (well, it's more of a research study, with statistics).
ALSO another article on this issue was that by Christian Amanpour, that journalists are now facing an existential crisis - one of the reasons being the "tsunami of fake news". She asks "whether technology has finally outpaced our human ability to keep up".
Then my favorite response to all of this was this quote I came across, from Abdu'l-Bahá. For me, this was the perfect reminder to not indulge in all the political quagmire (be it by talking with someone, or just sharing posts online), and instead share the positive, uplifting things.
5) From #FiveYearsTooMany to #7Bahais7Years to #ReleaseBahai7Now. This campaign is really close to my heart, especially since I got to be a part of it last year (you can read about my experience in this other blog post). Apart from that, here's an article about the campaign, by the Bahá'i International Community.
