One viral clip of one bad moment is not a fair picture of a person, a city or a generation.

REFLECTION

WHAT THIS MEANS

What travels is what is extreme, so the clip you saw was selected precisely because it is unrepresentative. A thousand ordinary minutes produce nothing worth sharing; one bad thirty seconds goes everywhere, and then it stands in for a person, a town or everybody your age. The sampling is backwards and nobody has to intend it.

When something makes you angry about a whole group, ask what the other hours looked like. Ask too whether you would want your own worst thirty seconds to be the clip. That is not excusing anything in it; it is refusing to mistake the loudest fragment for the thing itself.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

Which group did you judge from one short video?

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