{"id":100,"date":"2016-07-19T17:18:47","date_gmt":"2016-07-19T17:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/?p=100"},"modified":"2016-07-19T17:18:47","modified_gmt":"2016-07-19T17:18:47","slug":"social-media-grief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/?p=100","title":{"rendered":"Social Media Grief"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not writing about tragedies any more on my social media.<\/p>\n

Last week, we had a terrorist attack in Nice, France, an attempted coup in Turkey and police officers gunned down in Baton Rouge. \u00a0All three events are heartbreaking, senseless and have lit up social media with people discussing them, mourning the losses, and asking what can we do.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t write about any of them.<\/p>\n

I was upset as each one happened. \u00a0I was crushed to see the loss of life, the heartbreak of those who lost loved ones, the hate that drives these events, but I didn\u2019t write about them. \u00a0I have written about previous things in the past, expressing condolences, support, and the like. \u00a0However, in the end, none of that matters.<\/p>\n

Je suis Charlie, remember the fallen, black lives matter, blue lives matter, all lives matter, and on and on and on.<\/p>\n

It feels as if these things are happening with more regularity. \u00a0I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s true or if it is because we have the 24 hour cable news monster to be fed,\u00a0and politicians who are using and exploiting these tragedies for their own purposes.\u00a0\u00a0They\u2019ve become political. \u00a0If you express sadness for one tragedy and not their other, it makes you part of one group, so you must not like the other group. \u00a0Why didn\u2019t you comment on these deaths? \u00a0Are some people\u2019s lives worth more than others? \u00a0Do you not care about the people with the brown skins or the black skins or the yellow skins or the white skins?<\/p>\n

Enough.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want my social media experience to be that of endlessly talking about the tragedies in the world. \u00a0It\u2019s not that I don\u2019t care, or they don\u2019t touch me, but that I add nothing to the discussion, my comments on it are beneath negligible and help no one.<\/p>\n

And.<\/p>\n

When I see people using these events to attack other people, to call into question their beliefs and demand a kind of emotional consistency, it actually makes it all that much worse.<\/p>\n

These things are horrible enough. \u00a0We need to stop being horrible about them.<\/p>\n

Instead, if you can do something, do it.\u00a0 And that is what I will do from now on.<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"reddit\"<\/a>\"pinterest\"<\/a>\"linkedin\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not writing about tragedies any more on my social media. Last week, we had a terrorist attack in Nice, France, an attempted coup in Turkey and police officers gunned down in Baton Rouge. \u00a0All three events are heartbreaking, senseless and have lit up social media with people discussing them, mourning the losses, and asking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=100"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.solitairerose.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}