Back when the fires in Los Angeles were at their worst my family was talking about it because of relatives that live near there. My older brother lifted a plastic plant to mov it out of the way and when he did a piece of it fell off into a candle. Then my 13 year old brother tried to pull it out of the flame, and when everyone told him to just leave it alone because it wouldn’t do anything, he looked at all of us and said, “People like you are the reason why those fires are happening right now.”

Trying not to laugh at him we tried to explain to him the fires were caused by Eucalyptus trees brought to California in the 1920s because the people who lived there didn’t know that the trees took 100 years to grow or that when fully matured, release a highly flammable gas. But for ten minutes he still argued that careless people started a wildfire that then rapidly spread.

So obviously there is a problem, not with my younger brother, but with people in general not doing research. Why is there a large percentage of people who don’t understand the invention of the textbook or Google? The biggest reason is that it takes time to do. I mean of course, who would want to take five minutes to read about things that are happening in the world when you could take five seconds to read the usually over-exaggerated and clickbaity headlines.

Why do people use time as an excuse to not do research? The only thing I could think of is, if someone is working on a project and it takes days or even months to find any information on your topic, then it would be a little discouraging. But most of the time it’s only people who don’t understand the invention of sites like Google.

And another big reason is that people will do research, but only on one website. Now as any one who has used the internet once can tell you, every site will give different information about the same topic. So please, if you are going to take anything from this, take two minutes to look up your questions, and double check the info to make sure there isn’t a spread of wrong information.