Social Media

Since the rise of social media, it seems as though all of my friends are suddenly experts on a lot of things.  Something that is very popular for them to know all about it politics and their opinion is always the correct thing that everyone should believe.  Unfortunately for me, I have a wide range of friends on my Facebook feed, which means a wide spectrum of opinions that they post about more than they should.  I have friends, mostly people that know my parents and added me as well, that are old timey hippies and on the other end of it I see posts from the feed of down south redneck people.  Most of their posts drive me insane.

To solve this, I don't delete them or block them or comment on their posts telling them I'm tired of seeing what they say.  I simply scroll onto the next story, usually something funny from Buzzfeed or a football story from ESPN.  Just like that, I have avoided reading all about their rants.  I noticed that this was especially an issue during the aftermath of the Ferguson decision.  Some of my news feed was outraged over the decision, and they cried out that the grand jury made a mistake and that the cop should have faced a sentence.  Another part of my news feed consisted of people defending the cop, claiming that he did nothing wrong and the grand jury was right.  All the posts about it really started to annoy me, but I resorted to that little trick of scrolling on.

That is an issue with trying to accomplish things via social media.  It's so easy to post things and call out for action, and many people do it, and some are successful at it.  But if you're like me, I just scroll on and forget about it.  I can imagine that a lot of people would rather scroll onto the Buzzfeed post about the 21 cutest animal pictures of 2014 than read about something that needs action.  Because of that, I feel like a large audience is missed and it makes social media fairly ineffective in rallying people.

He's a Person, and Everyone Deserves to be Treated Nice

Scrolling through images online, I came across an image that had to do with Michael Brown.  A woman that taught young children, kindergartners or first graders, showed the kids Michael Brown's graduation photo of him in his cap and gown.  She then asked the kids how they would react to seeing this man on the street.  The kids did not recognize Michael as the young man that had been killed by a police officer, they just saw a man in a graduation cap.  The kids said they would congratulate him, or shake his hand, or share their snacks with him.  Their teacher asked them why they chose to react in such a kind way.  The kids responded along the lines of "He's a person and everyone should be nice to other people."

The children didn't seem to mind that he was a black man.  All they saw was a young man, during one of the proudest moments in his life.  They saw a man about to walk for his high school graduation, and the kids wanted to give him kind words.  Everyone else in the nation, however, do not feel the same way about Michael Brown.  An alarming number of people believe that Michael got what he had coming to him, and Darren Wilson was completely in the right to shoot him dead.

After reading "When All the Angels are White" and looking into the Michael Brown case a little bit, I saw that black people and white people are still held to very different standards, even in the 21st century.  It is very sad to me that we still live in a world where atrocities like this can be acceptable by the mainstream culture.  I wish to see our culture be reshaped into something that gives fair and equal treatment to everyone, and we need to start by holding people like Darren Wilson accountable for his actions.