Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Hatefulness Hanging in the Wash

Because of my unexpected health crisis, I find myself trolling the internet far more than usual.  And it's not pretty.

Now that we've flung open the windows to our personal bias, we're looking at everyone's stained laundry and cringing.  It's being hung out to dry in social media and it's shocking.

Ignorance is more cool than intelligence.  Yes, that means I've also been ignorant.  I've disregarded the flurry of Tweets, FB posts, and Instagram pics that are based on pure propaganda from family and friends.  I've told myself over and over again, everyone has a right to their own opinion.

And that is the crux of it.  The hatred and untruths that I see spewed aren't coming from well thought out opinions.  They're coming in the forms of  mindless re-tweets, FB sharing, and "like"s for memes that offer up another person's opinion.

What has happened to make people so lazy...or maybe they're just dazed?  Has fact-checking become too inconvenient or is it too painful?  We tend to see what we want to see and use our personal bias to hide from the rest.  So I'm guilty.  I've chosen to blind myself to the hateful rhetoric that's being vomited from people that I thought I knew.  It's disheartening and it goes beyond politics now.  It's the cutting comments toward another's religion, race, sexual preference and nationality and the passive-aggressive flaunts that say "there is only one way and it's my way" that shock me the most.  

I used to ponder why my ancestors would leave their home countries?  In my imagination, I see what they faced from an historical perspective:  Huguenots fleeing a spiteful king, the Dutch seeking greater financial opportunity, the Irish becoming indentured servants leaving behind starvation, and the Scandinavians...they, being the conquerors.

Instead, I'm pondering if they couldn't bear watching their family and friends turn into strangers when confronted with the stress of a changing society.  

We don't have to move to a different country.  We can move to a different city, state, or region.  We can limit our contact so that those old memories are more prominent than the ugly truths thrown at us in the guise of social media.  

We can also close the windows and pull in our stained and dirty laundry.