Almost all of us have Twitter, Facebook, or some other form of social media. Also, most of us have found ourselves being sucked into, and possibly contributing to, the rabbit hole that is the comment section of a post or the endless replies to a celebrity tweet. I am no exception to this.
When Hillary Clinton quote tweeted Donald Trump with “Delete your account.” I made the mistake of scrolling deep, deep down into the never ending replies. I scrolled past the standard comments of “YASS QUEEN” and “you slay girl” until I wound up staring in both disbelief and disgust at countless arguments between strangers.
Multiple people, who know nothing about whom they’re arguing with, aside from their Twitter handle and bio, were tearing into each other wielding a weapon forged from ignorance. Armed with little to go on but their combatant’s political leaning, both parties took it upon themselves to vehemently attack the other. It baffled me how willing people are to attempt to make someone who they don’t even know feel lesser about themselves.
However, that utter disregard for other people was not what disgusted me. My disgust was a result of the “political” conversation interspersed between the ignorant ad hominem. The Hillary supporter was lashing out with terms like internalized racism and white privilege, while the Trump supporter countered back by bringing up Benghazi and the ongoing email crisis. Based on your own political leanings, you’ve probably already discounted one argument and held up the other as more viable, and that’s fine, but in my opinion neither hold any weight and both contributed to an almost meaningless conversation.
Neither side of this impromptu Twitter war was contributing anything new to the “conversation” that they kept raving about. In fact, both of their arguments were predicated mainly on buzzwords that they had absorbed from Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC and then parroted out. They weren’t thinking. They were acting as empty vessels for a cause. Their dedication was measured in how loudly they could yell across the aisle at someone who was yelling just as loudly.
It’s disgusting.
We live in a world where two sides never sit down and talk to each other. We live in a “conversation” that’s never happening, because no one is listening to the other. And no one is listening because no one has anything new to say. Everyone likes to say that they're contributing, but contributing means applying new information, not just restating what’s already out there. I’m not contributing to mathematics when I state that 2+2=4, and I’m certainly not going to teach someone that by shouting down their throat.
The media and politicians do enough of that, but they do it because it works. We don’t take the time to become invested in issues, and we allow ourselves to be told how to feel. As I get older, I’m realizing more and more that the world doesn’t want us to think. Politicians don’t want us to be informed, they want us to agree with them. The media doesn’t care if we listen, they just want our time.
It’s maddening, but it can all start changing if we as individuals take the effort to deliberately think about our views and why we stand for them. Once we do that, then we’ll actually have reasons for our views, and we may find that they’ve changed. However, you can’t do this if you keep spouting off that Trump is a bigot or that Hillary should go to prison.
That’s lazy. It takes absolutely zero thought, and all you are becoming is a puppet that’s relaying what the master is telling you. Plus, we both know that the conversation won’t go anywhere. I’ve heard multiple times at church that no one comes to Christ over Facebook, and the exact same can be said about politics. So why not use your time in a more constructive manner by looking into the issues and formulating your own opinions? Why not use your words intentionally to convey ideas instead of spouting off one-liners that have been passed around like the plague? I promise that you’ll get more out of it.
