My local radio station poses a trivia question every day. Not too long ago, they asked:

“How many hamburgers does McDonald’s sell

worldwide every second?

I had only an actual second to guess, because when I tuned in, the DJ was in the midst of announcing the winner. Quick. Quick. I guessed somewhere in the thousands.

Not even close.

The correct answer is 75!

I really didn’t believe it. Surely that was too low. So I went online and searched around for verification. Sure enough, that’s about right. It might be 85 this year. In fact, McDonald’s has its own quirky up-to-the-second count-down. You can find it here: https://everysecond.io/mcdonalds

So just for fun, I started asking people what they thought. I admit, I laughed when a bunch of high school kids guessed over a billion.

Partly, I laughed because these were teens that raised beef cattle.

“How many head of cattle would it take to make a billion hamburgers a second?” I asked. “Surely there wouldn’t be enough space on the earth to raise that much beef.

Hardly anyone I asked guessed less than a thousand. A few asked some follow-up questions, like:

Just hamburgers? What about cheeseburgers? Do Big Macs count as hamburgers?

Some people stopped to think about the demographics, pondering about the populations that prefer pork to beef, and those that eat no meat at all.

At any rate, 75 hamburgers per second adds up to 6.5 million per day and 3.2 billion per year. That’s still a lot of cattle.

Once person said that there are more Subways in the world than there are McDonalds.

I didn’t really believe that. There seems to be a McDonalds in ever municipality and at every highway exit. So I went back to my sleuthing. In 2024, Subway had about 38,000 stores and McDonalds had about 42,000 on the planet. Really? It seems like there are that many in Illinois, where I live.

The whole silly exercise got me thinking about what we perceive vs what is fact.

I wax philosophical here.

What we see from our vantage point is not what someone right next to us sees. Our conclusions are often formed without critical thinking, without a little simple arithmetic, without a panoramic view. Without contemplation.

So when the next outrage hits, like it seems to every day, I invite you to take a beat, think things through, gather facts, and try to step outside yourself before reacting. That’s what I’ll try to do.

I want to add a bunch of my own opinion here, but I won’t, because this isn’t about persuading you to see things my way. Although, surely I wish you would. It’s about opening up our minds and being willing to see things a different. way.