A Tragedy in Cincinnati
When I was a kid there were three TV channels, and we loved it. It was better than no channels, which had previously been the case. When it came to radio, there was AM only. Yes, there was also FM, but FM was to radio, what UHF was to TV, so it didn’t count. If this is confusing for today’s youthful minds, imagine what social media is to older folk; incoherent, jabbering noise.
Today, any incident, no matter how small, can be turned into a worldwide event, though social media. I’ve seen videos on YouTube with tens of millions of hits that were nothing more than a teenager putting baby powder in their sister’s hairdryer. Ask these same kids when the civil war happened, or why, and they’ll tell you the Vietnamese attacked pearl harbor over slavery….or something like that, and then laugh and continue watching a video of a guy who can fart a pretty impressive version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”
All of this media diversity creates cognitive noise, like a test pattern on an old television, only 24 hours a day. This analogy will be lost on anyone under the age of fifty, further demonstrating a continual fracturing of the social structure, or simply an old person’s analogy, take your pick.
For instance, the other day a lowland gorilla was shot dead after a young child had fallen into the gorilla’s habitat at the Cincinnati zoo. This immediately led to a social media meltdown. One group suggested that “White Privilege” was behind the gorilla’s death. “Let’s face it” they proclaimed, “If it had been a Black kid, nobody would’ve lifted a finger. That gorilla could’ve had the kid for a snack and White folk would’ve said “Oh well. There’s more where he came from. Let’s get some lunch. Watching that gorilla devour a small Black child gave me an appetite.”
Of course, the kid turned out to be Black, which created problems for this particular narrative. But, no worries, because another group was waiting in the wings, ready to pounce. When the kid’s dad, who was also Black, turned out to have a lengthy arrest record, the usual suspects said “Uh huh, see we told you! We knew it had to be some ghetto dweller that caused the death of this poor, magnificent gorilla.”
But, that wasn’t all. For other groups, the gorilla’s death was an indictment of all mankind. Who, apparently, needed to be wiped out as a pestilence, so lowland gorillas could thrive and nature be restored to its former, pre-human glory.
Still, others argued that one human child is worth a million gorillas. Exactly how they arrived at this mathematical equations was anybody’s guess. How about two million. What was the cutoff point? Perhaps it was like infinite monkeys typing on typewriters creating the complete works of Shakespeare. We’re not talking just a sonnet or two, but the whole bunch.
The real event was simple. And yes, it was tragic, but probably necessary. A precocious boy (are there any other kind) made a concerted effort to get close to a magnificent animal, and did. The animal, being an animal, was behaving like a confused animal. Maybe it was helping, albeit in an awkward and potentially dangerous fashion for the child. Yes, the parents should have been more attentive, leaving the zoo officials with no other choice but to shoot the unfortunate creature to ensure the safety of the child. That’s it. That’s the story.
Here’s the greater reality, not all individuals behave as members of tribes, acting according to some disgruntled jerks version of a racial stereotype. I am not a proxy for my race and neither are the mother and father of the child that fell into the gorilla habitat. Neither are gorillas vicious man-killers whose value is one, one-millionth of that of a human, based on some imaginary standard pulled from some writers ass. And, just because a story becomes big news, doesn’t make it the apocalypse. With social media, every news item is a potential apocalyptic event, whether it actually is or not. And, it certainly isn’t a symbol of human decadence worthy of a genocidal cleansing of humans from the planet.
What can I say but “Damn! You people are crazy!” So, you might want to turn off your computer and go for a walk or something. We’ll all be better off for it.
Mark Magula
Today, any incident, no matter how small, can be turned into a worldwide event, though social media. I’ve seen videos on YouTube with tens of millions of hits that were nothing more than a teenager putting baby powder in their sister’s hairdryer. Ask these same kids when the civil war happened, or why, and they’ll tell you the Vietnamese attacked pearl harbor over slavery….or something like that, and then laugh and continue watching a video of a guy who can fart a pretty impressive version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”
All of this media diversity creates cognitive noise, like a test pattern on an old television, only 24 hours a day. This analogy will be lost on anyone under the age of fifty, further demonstrating a continual fracturing of the social structure, or simply an old person’s analogy, take your pick.
For instance, the other day a lowland gorilla was shot dead after a young child had fallen into the gorilla’s habitat at the Cincinnati zoo. This immediately led to a social media meltdown. One group suggested that “White Privilege” was behind the gorilla’s death. “Let’s face it” they proclaimed, “If it had been a Black kid, nobody would’ve lifted a finger. That gorilla could’ve had the kid for a snack and White folk would’ve said “Oh well. There’s more where he came from. Let’s get some lunch. Watching that gorilla devour a small Black child gave me an appetite.”
Of course, the kid turned out to be Black, which created problems for this particular narrative. But, no worries, because another group was waiting in the wings, ready to pounce. When the kid’s dad, who was also Black, turned out to have a lengthy arrest record, the usual suspects said “Uh huh, see we told you! We knew it had to be some ghetto dweller that caused the death of this poor, magnificent gorilla.”
But, that wasn’t all. For other groups, the gorilla’s death was an indictment of all mankind. Who, apparently, needed to be wiped out as a pestilence, so lowland gorillas could thrive and nature be restored to its former, pre-human glory.
Still, others argued that one human child is worth a million gorillas. Exactly how they arrived at this mathematical equations was anybody’s guess. How about two million. What was the cutoff point? Perhaps it was like infinite monkeys typing on typewriters creating the complete works of Shakespeare. We’re not talking just a sonnet or two, but the whole bunch.
The real event was simple. And yes, it was tragic, but probably necessary. A precocious boy (are there any other kind) made a concerted effort to get close to a magnificent animal, and did. The animal, being an animal, was behaving like a confused animal. Maybe it was helping, albeit in an awkward and potentially dangerous fashion for the child. Yes, the parents should have been more attentive, leaving the zoo officials with no other choice but to shoot the unfortunate creature to ensure the safety of the child. That’s it. That’s the story.
Here’s the greater reality, not all individuals behave as members of tribes, acting according to some disgruntled jerks version of a racial stereotype. I am not a proxy for my race and neither are the mother and father of the child that fell into the gorilla habitat. Neither are gorillas vicious man-killers whose value is one, one-millionth of that of a human, based on some imaginary standard pulled from some writers ass. And, just because a story becomes big news, doesn’t make it the apocalypse. With social media, every news item is a potential apocalyptic event, whether it actually is or not. And, it certainly isn’t a symbol of human decadence worthy of a genocidal cleansing of humans from the planet.
What can I say but “Damn! You people are crazy!” So, you might want to turn off your computer and go for a walk or something. We’ll all be better off for it.
Mark Magula