Responses to tragedy – #Innapropriate

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]fter the Paris attacks, I was stunned. Nothing I can say could ever go anyway to describing how I felt, or even describing the tragedy of the event, and the events in Beirut and elsewhere. Such an enormous loss of human life, caused by other humans, is indescribable.

But evidently lots of other, very public, figures don’t find that to be the case. On the night of the tragedy I was avidly perusing my Twitter, keeping up to date with the way the events were unfolding. And during that perusal I found a reference to Tommy Robinson, leader of the EDL.

He’d tweeted this; ‘‏@TRobinsonNewEra  France has shut all borders. Bit fucking late don’t you think’ (Nov 13th). I was incensed, so I’ll admit that my reply wasn’t the most lucid – I went with a simple ‘you absolute fucking wanker’. Simple, but to the point. I was proud.

He’d tweeted this; ‘‏@TRobinsonNewEra  France has shut all borders. Bit fucking late don’t you think’

Evidently Tommy boy didn’t like this, so he retweeted it for his rabid dogs (followers) to get hold of and chew. Some of the best harassment towards me includes calling me a ‘progressive shitbag’, as if progress were the worst thing in the world, and ‘what do you are’, which shows the level of education of these people. My personal favourite was ‘the truth destroys fantasy. Tommy told the truth which makes your reality dead sorry for your loss’. What an interesting philosophical conundrum.

The trend continues with Newt Gingrich, who tweeted the excellently reasoned ‘@newtgingrich Imagine a theater with 10 or 15 citizens with concealed carry permits. We live in an age when evil men have to be killed by good people’. Yes, well done for that logic. When men kill other people with guns, the best way to stop that is to make it easier to get guns. I see that that makes total sense.

I’m not the only person who disapproves of the use of loss of life to further someone else’s agenda.

But I digress – what is it with public figures thinking that it’s appropriate to post things like this straight after something as tragic as Paris? I’m not the only person who disapproves of the use of loss of life to further someone else’s agenda. In fact, I’m certain that I’m probably in a majority.

If you know someone who does this, if you do it, stop. Take time to reflect on the loss of life, at least for a couple of days, before posting something that is clearly enormously offensive to a large amount of people. If you don’t, then the fact is that you prove that you don’t care about the deaths at all. You care about your political agenda and your own self-importance.