This is normal.
I don’t know why conspiracies bother trying to stay hidden. They inevitably crawl out of the woodwork and blow their cover. I’m friends with hard rightists and hard leftists, and it’s been whiplash watching them battle it out on social media. I’m not sure I prescribe to the political religion, but I do think there’s always something going on behind the curtain which certain persons don’t want the general public to see. This I believe all day long. But there are other people more gifted in this field of study than I, so we won’t get into it here.
I had a strange encounter with political religion the other day. I made a light-hearted comment about modern plumbing on a friend’s meme they reposted, and one of their acquaintances made due purpose to comment on my comment. Again, I was talking about plumbing. They made it about capitalism shaming. I’m not sure the point they were trying to achieve, because I was in no humor to humor them.
If we were in a cafe – I and my friend – and one of her friends happened to show up, overhear our conversation, and decided in that moment rather than introduce himself politely, talk of the weather, the coffee, any number of other pleasantries, he decides to immediately conversation shame someone he has never met before and turn a half-heard subject into his political platform, it would be like that. It would be exactly like that.
We comment on other people’s comments all the time, sometimes positively, but sometimes negatively. Social media has put all of us into one big room together and provided permission for us to talk to anyone we want without proper introduction or pleasantries.
I suppose it would be odd if everyone went about introducing themselves and providing small talk on Twitter…
“Good day! My name is Robert. How do you know Anne?”
“Hello! I’m Clara. Oh, Anne and I met at the library. We shared a love of dragon fiction!”
“Jolly good! I love dragons myself. The meme she just posted on which we are both commenting rather makes me envision Capitalism as the great evil dragon of our time!”
“Oh… You’re in the camp of depicting dragons as evil villains? That’s really disappointing. I don’t like you. Good bye.”
“Well, if you didn’t want to get hurt, you really should have private messaged Anne rather than comment on her meme!”
This has been,
Fanny T. Crispin
Written Things 