Those 'sad, pathetic morons' who hide behind the anonymity of social media were out in force today. I don’t know what they said because I refuse to give their opinions the time of day. It was reported in the news, of course. I do wonder whether the media shouldn’t ignore them too? Why are we fanning the fire by igniting debate, fuelling more division and hatred?
I feel for the footballers today, with every dickhead in the country accusing them of all kinds of shortcomings and faults. In the case of the three lost penalties, worse, calling them the most hurtful and hateful kinds of things. How would they feel, those anonymous posters, if every time they made a mistake or luck didn’t go their way, they had to read those kinds of comments about themselves? How would their parents and families feel? Get a life!
Maybe therein lies the sad truth, many of them probably don’t have ‘a life’. They could be marginalised, sad individuals who have had no successes of their own. Failures and misfits who take out their frustration by tearing down those striving for greatness. Perhaps they too have experienced judgement and hostility and the only way they know to deal with it, is to dish it out themselves? After all, I've just called them 'dickheads'. I’m not saying I feel sorry for them, but after all these decades of dealing with exactly the same shit, surely it’s time for a different approach. Why does this small section of society feel and act the way it does? What needs to change? We have to find a way to agree, even if that's just learning to live with disagreement without insulting, offending or hurting each other. Change the slanging match into a conversation.
As I write this, I’m conscious of just how difficult it is for humans to live with each other. Why is that? Other species don’t do this as far as I know. I can’t imagine elephants laying in to each other just because one of them trips over. Or penguin colonies suddenly splitting in two and going their different ways only to fight whenever they cross paths. Why do we persist in this kind of behaviour? At a rational level we all know it’s not good for our species. But then we’re not very good at doing what’s good for us. We’re the number one when it comes to harming ourselves. No other species on earth comes anywhere near our ingenuity and efficacy when it comes to killing our own kind.
We have invented so many different ways to kill ourselves; war, violent crime, suicide, drugs, alcohol, poisoning, fires, drownings, falls…. In the last year (June 2020 to June 2021) suicide was the second highest non-medical cause of death in the world. The first was accidents. Then there’s Covid, that been the world’s third highest killer of all (after heart disease and cancer) with more than 3.25m lives lost to the disease in the last year alone. Our lifestyle is causing pandemics to be more frequent and we’re still doing so little about it.
How do I get positive in all of this? It’s hard. The only thing I can do is look out of my window at the cloudy sky and do whatever I can, however I can, to ensure those blue skies return.