I don't know if it's my age finally catching up with me or just finally the reality of how we treat people without thinking first, but my initial reaction was not to laugh like I probably would have last week. My first feeling was of anger at the cruelty of those who were laughing at this woman, then sadness for how she will feel when she comes across it. I came back to anger again when I thought of the person taking the photo, the cruelty in their soul that made them take a photo of an innocent person with their cellphone so they could post it on the internet for millions of people to mock. They chose this as their first reaction rather than thinking maybe she had mental problems, or maybe she just liked that style and it's her right, or maybe she styled her hair so big and put on so much make-up to hide the pain inside that she feels no one will understand.
My anger was further inflamed when I clicked on the "share" icon beneath the photo to see what kind of people had shared this mockery and what they were saying about her to their friends. I was outraged at the jobs some of these people hold! Church rectories, assisted living nurses, grief councilors, retirement home assistants, school teachers, and people who fill out their "About me" with mantras about caring about others, karma, treating others as you would like to be treated, bible scriptures, Buddha phrases...
HYPOCRITES!
How dare they?!?!
This site is my way of tapping into my spirituality and trying to bring out the positive aspects of my gentler side. I have a site where I can rant like this and angrily condemn people to get the negativity of my more volatile side out. I decided not to do that with this because it very much involves spirituality - the spirituality of this planet and of the people on it, spirituality that is crumbling into darkness that no one wants to see before us.
It is much too easy to mock people for not falling into some social norm now that we have cellphones and the internet. It makes us all the popular kids we weren't in school, and allows the previous high school in-crowd to continue their hallucination of being superior when they are probably nothing more than drones in a rat-maze office.
What right do we have taking photos of people we don't know and sharing them with the world to ridicule? How many people who do this on sites like People of WalMart feverishly click "Like" and "Share" on stories and memes about the dangers of bullying? Do these people think bullying only happens or matters in school? Do they think that someone finding their image on a website with thousands or even millions of people laughing at them won't hurt? That it isn't bullying? How about stalking? How would these same people feel if it happened to them? No one thinks this way. They are too caught up in being popular on the internet, in how many "likes" their cruel pictures will get, and becoming an internet celebrity for a few minutes at the expense of an innocent person who did nothing wrong to them to deserve it.
I'm sad not only because I have laughed at these myself but because, also, that we have become so full of hate and cruelty toward each other. We are so low that we rejoice in making complete strangers suffer for a few laughs.
My greatest hope is that the people featured in these photos never see themselves online.
My second hope is that if they do, it doesn't cause them to harm themselves and they are able to somehow ... SOMEHOW ... come away from it without any kind of hardships.
My next hope is that if people they know see the images, they will show compassion and not take advantage of the situation to humiliate the person.
And my final hope is that if they do discover the images, they are able to track down who did it and sue them for everything they have for emotional abuse, stalking, and slander.
With all that we have accomplished - electricity, flight, space travel, nano-technology - how are we still so primitively heartless and cruel?
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