The other day I was sitting outside the library and I overheard a conversation about a guy who got his roommate’s girlfriend pregnant. The guy was distraught and did not know what to do. For the past three months, he and his roommate’s girlfriend had been messing around and now she was carrying his child. Apart from the fact that his roommate was unaware of the infidelity, the innocent roommate believed the child to be his and asked for his girlfriend’s hand in marriage. The guy chose to do something that was completely unfathomable, but the craziest part of this story is not the fact that the cheating roommate is a very popular guy, or that the girl is a member of the divine nine, but the fact that I totally made the story up. This is how rumors get started.
While the scenario above did not really take place it still amazes me how people believe things that they hear and don’t know to be true. What actually happened that day outside the library is that a young man was walking by when another gentleman leaned over to his friend and said, ” Don’t talk to that dude right there.I don’t like him.” Not understanding why he should not talk to the person that he did know or ever seen before, he, of course, asked why. His friend then responded, ” I really don’t know, I just don’t like him.”
As ignorant as it sounds there are many students on this campus right now who don’t associate or stop associating with certain people just because their soror, best friend, or someone told them something terrible about another person. I had never given this much thought until I found myself holding prejudices against someone else. I was guilty of the same offense and I soon realized I had to change the way I think. I then asked myself how many people might have stopped speaking or being cordial with me based on something they heard.
I have always been a firm believer that every rumor starts from somewhere. Kind of like that game “Telephone” that kids used to play where a group of people sit around in a circle and whisper something in someone’s ear and then pass the message around without repetition. The purpose of the game was to see if the message would still hold the same content by the time it got around to the last person. In many cases, the message changed significantly and was very different from what the message was originally.
Don’t you agree that there is a major problem when people try to influence other people to stop talking or hanging out with someone just because they may have had a misunderstanding with them? There are many times when people try to make someone else look bad or throw dirt on their name due to what somebody said. If someone is really a terrible person it’s going to eventually manifest itself without you spreading the word but trying to turn other people against them because you don’t like them is childish and highly uncalled for.