I am addicted to Twitter. It is where I get all of my information about news, sports and entertainment. It is also where I keep up with the thoughts of friends and coworkers. However, there is something about Twitter that I have noticed.
A lot of people are mad.
Democrats are mad at Republicans for ruining the country. Republicans are mad at Democrats for ruining the country. People are mad because someone is wanting to take away their rights. People are mad and want other people’s rights taken away.
A Twitter timeline can quickly turn into a stream of rage.
A few months ago, a woman followed me, and, since we had some common relations, I followed her. Before long, I realized that she is one of those mad people who thinks Republicans are the spawn of Satan. Every tweet was filled with anger toward the people who she blamed for all of the ills of the world. There were no tweets about anything else.
After a while, I began to feel sorry for her. Is her whole life focused on political hate? I could not stand it for long and stopped following her. A few weeks later, she stopped following me.
She is just one example, and I can find plenty that come from the other side of the aisle. My point is not to disparage political ideals. It is to come to grips with the fact that the world is full of anger.
When it comes to politics, people have always gotten upset. Heck, politics is all about winners and losers, and losers usually do not walk away happily. However, in the social media world in which we live the anger has been ramped up.
Simply, people say things on Twitter that they would never say to someone’s face. It is like they are behind a protective wall and cannot be held accountable for the hateful things they say about others.
This also spills over into the world of sports. You have not seen anything until you have seen the messages that grown men send to high school kids who did not choose to play football for their favorite schools. They call them losers. They hope that they will get hurt.
The anger on social media is over the top, and I have not even mentioned Facebook, a domain in which I refuse to enter. On Twitter people only have 150 characters to spew their madness. On Facebook, they can write paragraph after paragraph. I cannot imagine what people say on that platform.
All of this brings Howard Beale to my mind. If you do not know Howard Beale, then I bet you know what he said. Howard is a character in Network, a 1970s movie about the television industry. Howard is a news anchor who becomes unhinged, and the network gives him his own show to spout his ramblings.
He becomes popular when he talks about the problems of the world and the frustrations they cause. He asks his audience to go to their windows and yell, “I’M MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!!”
Soon, people all over the country are yelling out of their windows. I wish more people would do that. Instead of getting on social media and talking about other people, they should just go outside and yell. Then, they are relieved of their frustrations without filling my timeline with senseless anger.
I say senseless because we can get on Twitter or Facebook or a blog and talk about how terrible other people are making our world, but it is not going to stop anything. If you are really mad then get off social media and do something to fix what you think is wrong.
Of course, you could just do what Howard Beale said 40 years ago. Yell out a window.
SBI: A Thinning Crowd 