I know I haven't written anything in ages. I got all neurotic about it, so let's just leave it at that and move on, yeah?
Oh, that seems to be a new, well, style of my typing. I don't think I say it. At least I haven't noticed. But in e-mails and stuff, I add ',yeah?' to all kinds of statements. Where the hell did that come from?
Oh, point, right. The title.
So, here's the background. I read quite a lot of stuff on the internet. Like, a lot of news stories, and a lot of things that might be considered to pass for news, but really aren't. They might show up in Google News, but you know they're meaningless crap. I read insignificant news. I read less about significant news for some reason. If there are like 1000 articles about it, I read the headline and a sentence. No, I spend my time going after like everything ever written about the Patriots (at least since their last game), everything about Tim Minchin I can possibly find (my Idol, swoon). I check out other NFL stuff now the playoffs are here, I look at movie reviews. Even for movies that there is absolutely no chance in hell I will ever see (The Dilemma, although if I had an exact amount of screentime for Channing Tatum and it was sufficient I could be convinced. However, I know absolutely no one who would want to convince me to see that.) I read NYTimes columnists. Lately I've been rather hypervigilant about the weather with the whole blizzard thing. And I inevitably end up on People or some other even worse crap because some little thing about a celebrity I like shows up (partly this is because of awards season, but realistically I'd land on them anyway). As you can surely see, this is colossal waste of time.
But I've gone one better. I've started to read the comments. Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that this is really an excuse to, for some reason, waste an even more absurd quantity of time on uselessness. However, I did have a rationale. I never looked at them before. However, on some sites you can't help but catch a few while you are navigating around. And, usually, I was shocked at how remarkably stupid and obnoxious those comments were.
Now, I have felt a certain level of disconnect from my fellow Americans. These would be the ones who think we should all be toting guns, get all their misinformation from Fox News, which they trust completely, think that something with 8 cells is a life that must be preserved but happily lethally inject people who may not have done anything wrong. Oh, and particularly mystifying to me is the fact that so many Americans don't 'believe' in evolution. Its not a belief its a reality.
But anyway, it occurred to be that some of these ALL CAPS, misspelled, horrible grammar comments about how god was going to strike people down for things like having the temerity to make fun of him, might be coming from these people who I do not understand. Since I have absolutely no personal experience with any of these people, it occurred to me that by reading the comments that people post on the internet I might get a little bit of a sense of what goes on in these people's brains.
Thus far my conclusion would be not much.
But I'm trying to be nice here. Well.... I'm trying to be nice up to a point.
Now I do realize that there are just asses out there who post mean shit just to get a rise out of people and sit there and laugh while all the other readers come along and post outraged comments. I cannot imagine how this is fun, but I can't think of any other reason they would do it, so they must find it fun. And all the readers coming after run like lemmings off a cliff to post outraged comments over the stupid, deliberately inflammatory remark. But they're small potatoes and easily identified (the instigators I mean).
There are lots of fascinating things to be found in the comments section. One recent one that intrigued me was a story of a celebrity being pregnant (yay! in our culture we celebrate and cheer and the media covers incessantly every fetus conceived to anyone whose name some portion of the country will recognize). Said celebrity has been with her boyfriend for 9 months, she's firmly in the adult years, no teenager here, and apparently the pregnancy was unplanned? I don't even know that. (How the hell would any of us know that). I was shocked to see many comments about her being a slut/whore because she got pregnant accidentally. Sarcastic, nasty comments. How irresponsible, her rocker boyfriend, failing to use birth control. What the hell? I mean, these aren't the instigators from above. These are to all appearances people, generally women, who believe that because an adult woman isn't married, despite the fact that she can provide for her kids WAY better than they ever will be able to, she is some kind of terrible person if she gets pregnant. I'm sorry. This one kind of blew my mind.
But that's exactly the point. I wouldn't know that such people existed if I didn't see their comments. Otherwise I would have to rely on the unreliable news media to tell me they exist. (and the evidence of our current Congress to tell me they voted).
However, I stopped myself tonight because I was about to step over a line I do not want to step over, ever. I wanted to reply. No! I will not go there. I have never commented (except on a couple of New York Times articles, and not the type that lead to vitriol-infused debate).
So what nearly pushed me over the edge? It was probably a fairly innocuous comment, and my reply certainly wouldn't have been obnoxious. I just, reached that point, where the level of annoying people got to be too much.
The article was an American one about the boy who drowned with his mother in Australia after he told a rescuer to save his brother first. The comment that set me off? I'm not going to go back and find it, so we're doing paraphrase here: God has Christina (girl shot in Tucson) and Jordan (boy drowned in Australia) with him in heaven, and he has taken them there for some reason, maybe to make us all stop and think about what we're doing and learn from them. We don't know the reasons for what god does. If we did, then we'd be god.
That's it essentially. Its not awful I suppose. But...seriously!
My reply, which I did not post, was going to be along these lines:
Or, horrible and tragic things happen in this world, and we as human beings are capable of standing up and facing that reality without plastering a smiley face on it and pretending it all happened for some mysterious reason known only to a god.
When I realized that the plastering a smiley face or something similar was just going to happen I pulled back, immediately navigated away from the page and wrote it here instead.
I think I shall cut back on the comment reading, lest I get tempted once again to join the fray.
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