Viewpoint by Elaine Bonilla/se news editor

Everyone uses social media to rant about any and every thing. Now, it seems everyone is talking about politics with the government shutdown and Syria being the latest topics.

Two types of people seem to blow up the news stream when something big in politics happens. First are those who just whine and cry about who’s to blame and why, the ones who have post after post of their views, mostly just nonsense that nobody cares about.

What is the reason for stating political content? Do they really think their ranting is going to change someone else’s mind just because of what was posted? This just tempts me to use the “hide feed” or “unfollow” button.

Then while scrolling through the feeds, I find the political posers. These people never said a word about politics before but now have something to say about it. These act like they know what is going on and just pick a side and stick with it. Just days before, they were posting videos of cats or what they had for lunch.

Who knew they even thought about these things? Feed after feed shows posts about who’s to blame and why.

Here’s an idea. Instead of basing opinions off everyone else’s biased opinions thrown across the social media network, maybe some time should be spent reading and discussing issues to learn the real reasons behind what’s going on in politics, how often it happens and why the U.S. is doing what it’s doing.

Either way, political rants are not a good idea because someone could be offended. Maybe it’s a friend, family member or even someone from work who is higher up on the chain, and you just pushed their buttons.

If a little effort was put into learning about the current topics at hand instead of reading what everyone else is posting, then maybe, just maybe, an informed personal opinion would be formed.

If people really want to have a say in what’s going on in politics, then maybe they should brush up their knowledge on current events. They could even walk into a voting booth and make a decision where their opinion is noted or associate themselves with a political party. Anything is better than gathering “facts” from Facebook friends and forcing them together into a half-hearted personal opinion that doesn’t really makes sense.