You Do Not Need to Know Everything

Bears don’t just “sleep” but you didn’t need to know that.

A defining quality in using Twitter is expressing anger. It’s hard to browse the platform without seeing someone’s injustice experience — which is rightfully complained about — or other nuanced frustrations about society. The challenge here is expressing how you feel with such limited characters. You only get 280 characters. What if I told you it was half of that four years ago?

As discussed on John and Hank Green’s podcast, Dear Hank & John, hibernation is a perfect metaphor for this discourse. Oftentimes, subjects are more complicated and obtuse than they appear. As children, we’re taught that animals such as bears will just…sleep…for several months, when that isn’t so much what’s actually happening.

Myths like this are debunked all the time on the internet. U.S. and North American history is where this is very common. In high school, we’re taught that Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue” to prove that the Earth is round, not flat, when actually, it was common knowledge that the Earth wasn’t flat in the late-1400s. If you browse the internet around “Columbus Day,” a flood of tweets will roll in explaining this, some to go as far to say that Columbus never actually landed in the United States. Some will even explain how he…