People love to deflect blame. It’s in our nature to believe what we do is right and what others do is wrong. We surround ourselves with people and perspectives that confirm our own biases.

 Various events that have happened over the past several months have been wrongfully blamed on our school. I’m not arguing that UT is entirely blameless. There are absolutely ways that the school could have responded to various things differently. However, by blaming the University of Texas, the actual individuals responsible are not held accountable.  

When these events happen, we are quick to blame the commonality we all experience: our school. Being members of the UT community, we misplace responsibility on our school. Students should reassess who is actually responsible.

 As a student body, we must reassess our mechanism for blame. Senate Bill 17 is a state law, ratified by the state legislature, prohibiting state institutions from using or promoting certain words. When the bill was ratified, students and alumni protested, claiming that the school had an imperative to support what SB17 took away. The school does have this imperative, and the school, in the various press releases following the ratification of the bill, maintained a commitment to “work(ing) within the law to ensure the campus continues to be a welcoming place for community members.”

 By blaming UT for this specifically, we fail to hold the elected members of the state legislature responsible. To be clear, I’m not trying to advocate in support of or defiance of SB17. I would probably still write this article if the bill went in a completely different direction.  I’m trying to argue that we have completely missed the mark when determining responsibility. UT is not responsible for SB17 or its aftermath; it simply has a legal obligation to the law. Chastising the University is a poor allocation of effort and resources and foments a disdain towards our school.

Currently, this misdirected accountability toward UT has been exacerbated during the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Many people equate UT’s inability to take a stance to turning a blind eye to this conflict. However, we should only hold UT accountable insofar as UT can actually act upon a certain issue. As it stands, the effect that the University of Texas has on international policy is negligible. 

Regardless of where you fall on the Israel-Palestine debate, holding UT accountable doesn’t make a difference, and can cause the community more harm than good. Again, I need to clarify that I am not advocating for a pro-Israel or pro-Palestine stance. I just believe that we can utilize our responsibility mechanism more efficiently. 

With how polarized our national discourse is over what’s happening in the Middle East, it’s imperative that we don’t succumb to petty malice and disinformation. There’s a stark difference between blame and responsibility according to Steven Stosny, Ph.D.. “Blame is about causes… responsibility is about solutions.” We should strive to hold the institutions that perpetuate hate accountable. Similarly, we should strive to be curious and understand all sides of a story before acknowledging its plausibility.

 As a student body and as individuals living in a society where we have a voice, we must use it for progress and betterment. When we allocate blame to institutions or individuals that have little impact on the actual catalysts behind certain events, we deprive ourselves and our society of solving the important problems of our day.

When someone wrongs us, we immediately think the worst. Who else has gotten the “Sorry, something came up, I can’t hang out” text? Without context for someone’s actions, our automatic instinct is to view them as negative, even if they’re not.

This situation isn’t uncommon. Disagreements can often cause us to immediately resort to hostile reactions. Has someone ever cut you off in traffic, so you sped up and cut them off? In reality, you have no way of knowing what someone else is going through at that moment.

Road rage isn’t safe behavior, but by asking questions instead of rushing to conclusions, we can give ourselves the opportunity to consider the whole picture instead of getting locked into our own perspective. Doing so can help keep us from acting irrationally in a tense situation. Many road rage-related deaths are caused by one’s reaction to an aggressive driver. Take a step back and focus on intent.

“I try not to take it to heart; you’re going through your own bubbles in your head,” said international business senior Marisol Hernandez. 

As situations occur in our lives, oftentimes our intention for certain actions is overshadowed by the way they’re perceived. As reactionary people, it’s crucial that we don’t overreact when something negative happens to us. 

A couple weeks ago, my mom’s car got towed from my apartment’s parking garage while she was staying with me. Admittedly, she was parked in someone else’s spot. And while the rightful occupant of the parking spot had a pressing reason to do so, they did not leave a note or attempt to find the owner of the car. Despite this and the roughly 30 other spots that were open in the very near vicinity, my mom’s car got towed in the middle of the night as a medical situation kept us occupied.

The poet Walt Whitman said, “Be curious, not judgemental.” It’s simple, but asking questions before making assumptions gives us the ability to better understand the motivations behind the actions of others. Moreover, we keep ourselves from forming judgments about those we know nothing about. 

As students living in a hectic and fast-paced environment, we tend to rush to the conclusion that when someone acts in a way we find confusing or disagree with, it’s because they’re “out to get us.”  We tell our friends about what happened and, like an infection, our assumptions spread and cause others to match our negativity. 

Of course, some people genuinely do have bad intent, but by giving them the benefit of the doubt, we protect ourselves from any unforeseen consequences that may come from our retaliatory behavior.

If someone had assumed positive intent, my mom wouldn’t have had to pay $250 to get her car back. We wouldn’t have had to spend our mental resources retrieving it in the middle of the night. 

“I think it’s important that we practice openness and awareness in terms of judgment. I try to stop, scold, and correct myself and replace judgmental words (with valuable ones)” said Hernandez. 

When we give people the benefit of the doubt, we have the chance to end the cycle of retaliatory behavior. We give them a chance to explain why they made their choices free of judgment. 

In the midst of midterms, college can be pretty difficult. Students are expected to write long papers, spend long, exhaustive hours studying for tests or deal with uncooperative group members on projects. It would be easy to stop studying or writing and instead watch an episode of “The Bachelor” or a new movie.

While we may be tempted to revert to our comfortable tendencies, we shouldn’t. Whatever difficulty is going on in your life right now, embrace it. Though the phrase is cliché, it’s important to remember that we are most benefited by pushing through adversity. Stress is crucial to building our ideas and perspectives. It’s imperative we use it as a growth opportunity, as difficult as it may be. 

“I like taking a step back and saying, ‘Ok, what can I control right now?’” said Valentina Ponce, an international relations and global studies senior. 

Any time we’re put in a particularly taxing situation, we need to find the things that we’re able to control and use those to get back to a place of growth. 

There are three different places that we can exist in at a given time: comfort, growth and danger zones. We should strive to exist in the growth zone, a place where we aren’t comfortable, but are pushing ourselves beyond our existing boundaries. We should only resort back to the comfort zone when we push too hard, potentially into the danger zone. The danger zone is where we put our minds and bodies at risk. 

I wouldn’t consider myself an adrenaline junkie by any metric. I enjoy doing predictable things like golf, pickleball, lifting weights and running. You could guess that I wasn’t too thrilled when I agreed to go skydiving when I was asked.

I was told that in the moments before jumping out of a plane, you face every fear you’ve ever had. Yet, as I threw myself out of a plane, accelerating toward the Earth, I felt solemn pride in my decisiveness and courage to do something so outlandish. 

We aren’t meant to be in the air; gravity exists for a reason. But in that moment, there was no fear of death to be found. Comfort breeds complacency, and complacency results in laziness. When we exist in our growth zone, we learn more about ourselves and how we deal with different situations.

“I like being uncomfortable. … Being uncomfortable pushes me to face my fears,” said Ponce. “I learned that you are your biggest critic. People are just there to learn, and the only thing you should be stressed about is getting your information correct.” 

Our own fears and anxieties are more of a hindrance than what our peers think.  

We can learn amazing things about ourselves when we just say yes to something we wouldn’t normally do. Without stress, we can never grow. Without growth, we can never succeed. So whatever stress is facing you in your life — whether it be an impossible roommate or a daunting midterm — keep pushing. Not only will it get better, but your future self will be eternally grateful. 

At the end of the day, we likely won’t remember the stress we felt when studying for a seemingly impossible test. We will, however, remember the feeling of seeing a grade as rewarding as the effort you put into earning it. 

Students graduating this year will be the most technologically savvy in human history, with the knowledge of the world in their pockets. Whereas our parents had to scour encyclopedias, we can answer almost any question faster than it takes to open a book. With so much available information, the question must be answered: is this fact or fiction? 

“I get most of my news from Reddit, but I get some from Twitter and Instagram as well,” said Jake Funderburg, senior sports management major. “I see a lot of false comments and inaccurate posts on X that are marked as false.”

Social media sites are one of the most common places that people go to receive news, yet it gives everyday people who lack journalistic ethics an opportunity to engage in the national discourse from a variety of perspectives, often with various levels of accuracy.  

Dr. Michael Mosser, the Executive Director at the Global Disinformation Lab at UT, argues that social media has only amplified trends. 

“(Social media has) accelerated the transfer of information to the point now where the democratization (of information) is more or less instantaneous,” Mosser said.

The ‘democratization of information,’ or the widespread dissemination of information to the masses, has been a trend since the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenburg. 

As more people have the ability to instantaneously share information on social media, the reliability of information dwindles. A 2016 Politico article contends that it wasn’t until the rise of web-generated news that the journalistic ethical standard developed during the 20th century began to deteriorate. 

Dr. Mosser argues this is the product of editorial control becoming the responsibility of the consumer. In the past, when there were only several news sources, there were “journalists and editors who had to follow journalistic ethics.” Said Mosser. “Nowadays, people have to exercise editorial control that previous generations didn’t.” 

When I asked Dr. Mosser about how to avoid disinformation, he said that if we read something “that’s in line with your expectations already, that’s red flag number 1.”

Rather than engage with sources that provide a biased interpretation of events, we should strive to understand the total story before forming an opinion. Information is unbiased, a clear and direct portrayal of the facts. If we interact with biased information, we are prone to misinformation by others. 

While we often gravitate towards  self-confirming news and material, we should visit sources with differing perspectives in order to broaden our horizons. 

We should be asking critical questions when interacting with information to learn more about the objectives of the work, or the accuracy of the information based on where it comes from. Inquiring about these important details anytime we encounter new material will keep us from falling for disinformation.

In a time of mass polarization over every issue in politics, question everything. This world is full of malicious actors who profit from dividing us. Next time you see something that informs your understanding of current events, think twice and check to see if it’s fact or fiction.