Life and people are MUCH more complicated and messy than a picture, or short video you catch on Twitter....but that doesn’t stop us. Click here to see one mea culpa.
When we become filled with outrage, we lose the ability to reason...and that will be the death of us....as a nation.
We may as well live in the time of pitchforks, and burnings at the stake. We are destroying people’s lives.
The kid in question was misidentified by the mob, which went after a kid who wasn’t even there. Home addresses were shared and threats made.
Think about that for a second.
As a girl, a young woman, and now an actual grown-ass adult, adulting all over the place, I stumble. I fall. I fail spectacularly and in astonishing ways
I fall short. I get up, and I try to do better. Most of the people I know are like that.
People who know me will tell you I am a hot mess, but a pretty nice person, in all. It isn’t possible for me to hold a grudge. I do a lot for charity. I do things meant to make the world better, albeit in tiny ways.
But catch me on a really bad day, and I can pretty much guarantee I can come-off as not very nice. Put that moment on Twitter, and that will become my defining moment. And it is a moment.
A guy I was seeing once asked me why so many photographs catch people with odd expressions, or are just bad. I didn’t even have to think about it. I said, a photo is a split second in time, and our eyes don’t see that way. Our brains process the whole of what we are seeing, while a camera stops time.
We are in danger of looking at split-seconds in time, and trying to process that moment as if we are seeing the entirety of what is happening.
It isn’t possible to do that, and retain your sanity.
Look at it this way, the pitchforks and torches are still there...but maybe we should be slower to pick them up.