The Right Information
After I woke up this morning, I received a shock because Inari-san had sent me a message and this is what he said: “The pm will declare lockdown soon. So buy enough foods as soon as possible.” Although I’ve always believed that the situation in Japan would be like many other countries, I couldn’t believe that a lockdown was going to happen today.
I asked Inari-san where he got his information and quickly checked NHK, The Japan Times and BBC Japan.
None of the three had reported anything about a lockdown happening.
I started to doubt, but I asked Inari-san where he got his information because I thought it could have been possible that English news sites in Japan are slower to report on such things.
His reply was: from a person who has heard it from a TV producer.
When I read his message, I knew all was well.
I am not writing this because I don’t believe a lockdown will happen. In fact, I think there’s a good chance that a lockdown will happen if the number of cases keep going up. I don’t like expressing my opinion on the internet; but as person who learned about the importance of communicating the right information and as a person who believes that “knowledge is power,” I am making an exception this time to express myself.
I have only one thing I really want to say: please make sure that you get information from credible sources, especially during times like these when the world is not in a good place. Make sure you get your information from credible news sources. Take your information from different news sources so that you don’t learn just one side of the story.
Social media “news” is not news unless they take their information from credible sources. “News” received by word-of-mouth is not news. Check sources. Make sure they are credible and not one-sided.
Again, I am not writing this because I don’t think people should not be prepared for a lockdown. We should be. We should have enough food stocked up if a lockdown does happen, but that is the keyword: enough.
Misinformation can cause panic, like it did when so many people bought more toilet paper than they needed and created shortage so that the people who needed it couldn’t buy it anymore. Panic, in turn, causes people to make bad decisions, and bad decisions, I think, are especially dangerous during bad times.
Of course, it’s very possible that everyone reading this already knows what I just said; but, as anyone call tell from this VERY RARE LONG POST, I am quite passionate about getting the right information.
Now that I have said what I really wanted to say, I also want to say that I meant my first post of this school year to be positive, so I’m sorry that this is my first post instead. I’ll be more cheerful next time. 😆😆😆