someone over the meme at the right. The main reason being that I think that the picture and your reaction to it, says a lot about who you are as a person.
The problem with the world is that we often have an inability to empathize. We can't think about what it is like to be in another persons shoes. Now, though, it seems that we don't even want to. The person with whom I was debating on Facebook was adamant that this meme was funny. I contend it is not.
A child was pulled into the water by an alligator near a Disney resort a couple days ago. What is funny about that?
When I first saw the meme, several things became clear on the screen and in my head. I am going to go ahead and say that if you laughed at that meme, you are a horrible person. I try to not be judgemental, but I think that I am on pretty safe ground when I say that laughing at the death of a toddler is a bad thing. No matter how much one wishes to justify it, it is purely bad.
The conversation did not go on long on Facebook, but long enough and enough platitudes were proffered to make me wonder about what is wrong with the world. I do not think that we, as a society have any kind of baseline for behavior, for ethics, for right and wrong. In a world where there is no right and wrong, there are no solutions. Without right and wrong or even an establishing a baseline for reality, there are no solutions to anything.
Look at any major discussion that we have been forced as a nation to reckon with in the past few days.
In the case of gun control, we cannot even decide whether or not there should BE gun control because the Constitution, if you conveniently remove the first clause in the sentence, says we can all have guns.
Should transgender people be able to use whatever restroom they like? There is no gender!
Should a nation founded on religious tolerance close its borders to Muslims for fear we have a repeat of what happened in Orlando a few days ago?
Trump is the greatest. Trump is the worst.
It goes on and on and on and the range of those issues is based on years of argument and in many cases scholarly debate by great thinkers. When we look at the Hegelian Dialectic, we are to suppose that a thesis is confronted by its antithesis and the two, through debate and logic, reach a synthesis. This, I was promised by my college professor would lead onward toward a homogeneous perfection. That is not happening though. We are more divided than ever.
We are more divided than ever and that is in large part because we cannot empathize and there is no line. Someone read the article, watched on the news, or wherever and saw that this tragedy had occurred. This was likely one of the happiest days of this child's short life and it ended. The last thing this child likely saw as he was dragged under the water were his parents and loved ones frantically rushing into the water, chasing him. Volunteers, helicopters, rescue workers went to work trying to find him with every hope that he would found alive. Meanwhile, someone else was setting to work to make a meme.
We should be able to say that there is nothing funny about this. We can make jokes about whatever, but we should be able to, without a doubt, say that there is NOTHING funny about this. We should be allowed to have a dark sense of humor about all sorts of things, even hypothetical dead babies. This is not some story about the color of a dress or the solution to some math problem. There are rarely absolute rights and absolute wrongs. This should be our line in the sand. If you laughed at the meme above, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Rest in Peace, Lane Graves
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