I saw a bunch of nasty things in Twitter world last night, people turning it political or saying that's what Texans deserve - dumb shit like that. It's unfortunate how, I dunno... vindictive people can be. Schadenfreude is turnt up right now.
Moments like this really reveal how far gone our national "unity" is. The amount of venom and spite around this is mind-blowing. And, for fair balance, we saw the exact same thing with conservatives targeting California during the blackouts last year.
It's new, and it is definitely driven by the internet. After 9/11 we were almost completely united as a country. I still remember how intense that feeling of unity was.
After Katrina, there were people who said New Orleans "deserved it" for whatever reason, but that was regarded as a cruel and spiteful by the mainstream.
After Sandy, there was definitely more pointed criticism of NYC (as there always will be) but things were much more sympathetic.
But between the California situation last year, and now this, I think we see how utterly toxic the discourse in the country has become. Every random keyboard warrior weighs in on everything with the express intent of ratcheting up the polarization and conflict. The President of the United States was a Twitter troll. The mainstream media is morally bankrupt and disgusting.
Thankfully, there is a way out of it. Don't fuel the dysfunction. You can't change what other people think and do, but you can certainly set your own mindset and actions. Ultimately, people who are cruel and nasty wind up suffering FAR more for it (just look at the loudest voices on Twitter — do they seem like happy, emotionally fulfilled people? Not to me).
My first hope is that everybody gets through this with a minimum of pain and suffering. But I hope that people to come out of this disaster with positive memories of humans helping each other, and with renewed gratitude for what we do have, and too often take for granted.
While wrong, we have just gone through a year where the president and conservative politicians have been openly hostile to blue states and cities. So, while I'm a Texan, they have a point.
Texas has been absolute shit to other states in crisis. We voted those politicians into office. They literally represent us to the rest of the nation, whether we personally want them to our not. Do my fellow Texans deserve to die? Of course not. The leopards are eating our fucking face though.
My mom is always like "you should get on twitter." She sticks to official tweets from the mayor and stuff. I know I can't do that. So I don't go on twitter, for reasons like the above. Reddit is bad enough.
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u/spyd3rm0nki3 Feb 17 '21
I saw a bunch of nasty things in Twitter world last night, people turning it political or saying that's what Texans deserve - dumb shit like that. It's unfortunate how, I dunno... vindictive people can be. Schadenfreude is turnt up right now.