It’s no secret I’m, let’s call it an “active participant” in social media. I do Facebook, I tweet, I post photos to Instagram, and, obviously, I blog. I showed up to a cousin’s birthday party one year and her brother commented that the world would now know what’s happening because I was there with my Facebook account.
I’m a social kind of girl.
Today, though, social media is making me sad. It was through Facebook first thing this morning that I learned of the mass shooting at an Orlando nightclub last night. Twitter brought to my attention the tweet of the lieutenant governor of Texas after news of the shooting, citing a Bible verse in which “men reap what they sow.” That tweet has since been deleted, but the pain it produced will not fade.
Yes, there are hundreds of thousands more tweets and Facebook posts expressing sadness, sorrow, pain. But it’s these few outbursts of joy, of celebration, of “you deserved it” that really stand out. These are the posts that remind us just how much hate there really is. No one deserves this. No one.
I know my friends lists are made up of those with differing political and religious views, those who support same-sex marriage and those who don’t, those who push for gun control and those who are responsible gun owners and users. I embrace our differences and still feel those differences make us stronger when we can accept them, discuss them.
These who are celebrating the shooting and the arrest of a man in West Hollywood with a car full of weapons heading to a Pride parade – those are people I don’t want to know. That’s not a community I have any interest in belonging to. If you find any joy or humor or take any bit of delight in the murders in Orlando or this arrest in West Hollywood, unfriend me now. Remove me from your address lists, your contacts, your friend lists – I am not part of that community, and I never will be.
Pour Me Some Whine 