Revising a Pre-Internet Opinion Piece for Social Media

 (Original opinion piece: The American Century by Henry R. Luce, for Life Magazine, published in February 1941)

We as Americans aren’t satisfied with the current state and future of this country. Despite being in the middle of a world war, and despite having the conflict take place in their country, the British are surprisingly at peace. Compared to other countries, we’re generally better off, but in these times we all are enduring the same things, and yet we’ve been handling it worse. We’ve been lying to ourselves and it has affected our politics, our journalism. While we may not have any soldiers fighting on the frontlines, we are involved in this conflict. We know that the easiest solution is to stay back and just let this war play out, but we know that we want to end Hitler’s reign of terror, and so even though we don’t have troops on the ground, we are part of this war. We got into this war because we want to defend the principles of democracy, not our home. If we fully go into this war, we fear that we’ll go into even more debt, and that in the effort to defend democracy the government will take such a strong hold that the democracy we know will cease to exist. Once we get fully into the war, we’ll be determined to win at any cost, but we don’t even truly know what we’re fighting for. It ends up becoming a battle between isolationism and internationalism, and we must take a route closer to internationalism because how we participate will strongly affect the world. In this century, we are emerging as a world power in a time of many advancements, and we must make the 20th century the century of America. We must prevent the Nazi party from becoming an empire by expanding our own reach around the world.

#america #war #20thcentury #americancentury #democracy #internationalism

I made many changes to this opinion, mainly shortening it from 13 pages to a paragraph. That is because, in today’s world of media, people tend to have shorter attention spans, so short-form media is ideal for holding a consumer’s attention for long enough to get the point across. Ideally, the above would be read in video format with the hashtags in the description of the video. The hashtags were another thing I added, as hashtags can be followed on social media, so the information would be shared with those hashtags and reach wider audiences.