Tragedy & Social Media

Tragedy strikes constantly all over the world, all the time, but there is little to no coverage about how people are living in war torn zones, with the inescapable, lingering thought of death everyday.
The Boston tragedy really upset me. Not only the event itself, but how people handled it on social media sites and the blatant disconnect our society seems to have with the outside world. Selective sympathy.

Everyday there is genocide. Everyday little girls and boys are being sold into human trafficking rings and being shipped to the highest bidder. Everyday children are being eaten from the inside out by parasites, by hunger. Everyday people are being faced with unimaginable choices of killing or being killed. Everyday there are people terrified to leave their house in fear they may not return to it alive. And most of these events are happening right in our backyard, but none of it is being televised.

Again, I am not trying to diminish the obviously horrible terrible assailment in Boston, just trying to display how edited our media sources are, allowing coverage for mindlessly violent events like this but ignoring others’ suffering. It makes my heart hurt knowing there is so much devastation in this world and the way people are becoming comfortable with showing “support” through social channels for a period of time and then forgetting the tragedy almost immediately after. I think it was amazing how organizations were mobilizing using twitter and sending out information about what was needed and a continuous stream of information about the attack. However, the hash tags made me want to vomit. DO NOT HASH TAG A TRAGEDY. There’s just something about putting an occurrence so heart-wrenching, so clearly painful into the context of a social media platform that just seems wildly inappropriate and insensitive when it’s done distastefully.

All of my heart goes out to the family of that adorable little boy and the other families who were affected by this. I cannot imagine the families’ loss.

This truly showed how connected we can all be when we focus our attention on something as a group, as humans. The amount of selflessness and genuine willingness to go above and beyond in times like these gives me hope about this otherwise individualistic, selfish society’s future. Kind of.

All together now!

IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!!