I’ve been on Twitter since 2012. I don’t have many followers, and I don’t follow that many people. Although I publish all of my blogposts on Twitter, I don’t often post much of anything else. I use it mostly for keeping up with people or things I find interesting. I follow people like Jake Tapper and Jonah Goldberg...and, of course, Andrew Freiden, ( everyone follows Andrew, right??)I also follow The Far Side, so I get a new cartoon every morning. It’s relatively entertaining, actually, since it features some of the most unhinged people you could ever hope to meet, if you go in for that sort of thing. But today something really bizarre happened that I still am having a hard time wrapping my head around...
Ok, early this morning during my routine news roundup, all I read about was the horrific mass shooting in Florida. I began thinking of how many times over the past ten years or so we have read similar stories. It’s heart breaking, infuriating, and depressing. Once again I felt the familiar frustrtion that nothing would change, that despite wall to wall coverage for a day or two, we Americans would eventually move on to some new outrage and the status quo would remain intact. Then I logged on to Facebook and summarzied my thoughts this way:
Quick quiz: Do any of you remember Stephen Paddock? No? He was the guy who killed 58 people in Las Vegas just 4 months ago, already forgotten. So too will Nikolas Cruz be forgotten 4 months from now. Such is the state of the American attention span and the casual routine of mass shootings in our country.
Then, almost on a whim, I decided to post this thought on Twitter. I cut and pasted, only to discover that the Twitter format would not accept the entire paragraph...so I cut off...and the casual routine of mass shootings in our country. I hit send and then stepped into the shower. By the time I got out of the shower, my phone was pinging off the hook, one notification after another in rapid fire succession. I picked up the phone and thought, what the heck is all this?
To make a long story short, at this hour, that simple, innocuous observation has been viewed over 260,000 times. It has been “liked” 3,400 times, and retweeted 1500 times. At this point nearly 90 people have felt moved to comment and their nearly unanimous verdict is that I am an: idiot, ignorant, moron, dickhead, dipshit, and turd...the first three indictments possibly true, the last three up for debate. The objections to my Tweet fall into several categories. The first one is a legitimate point of contention, ie.. that we shouldn’t remember the killers in these mass shootings, only the victims. This is a fair and valid point. The fact that I used the Las Vegas shooter’s name merely as a proxy for mass shootings in general seems to have gotten lost in translation. Then there were those who vehemently denied having forgotten a thing about Las Vegas, and me pointing out America’s short attention span was beyond the pale. Here, I feel to be on more solid ground. We have endured so many of these killings, it would be almost impossible not for them all to become muddled in our heads at this point. Then there were those who felt compelled to refer to me with scatological descriptors...which I kinda enjoyed. I had particular fun pointing out to one of my detractors that , in point of fact, “dickhead” was one word, not two!
In my almost 60 years of life I have written many things. I’ve written far better sentences. I’ve said things far dumber, far smarter and certainly more controversial than this in my life, but nothing has ever provoked so much reaction. Nothing else has even come close to this. I suppose it’s true what they say...there’s no accounting for taste.
I stand by my Tweet. Maybe it’s intent would have been clearer if the last few words from the Facebook version had been included. Or maybe not, since subtlety isn’t a concept that mixes well with a platform like Twitter. But, just in case anyone out there is still confused...I am horrified by each and every mass shooting in this country, but I’m not overly optimistic that anything substantial will be done to stop any of them anytime soon... no matter how temporarily outraged we all are at the moment.
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