In between the feel-good crap I like to post, I also keep on local current events.
Especially when it’s a kidnapping that’s happened in my childhood neighborhood.
Actually, there wasn’t a kidnapping – it was a mistaken event some kindly neighbor witnessed including a dude shoving a girl into a car. I didn’t learn anything about it until after it’d been clarified this was a visual misunderstanding from the observing woman. But what stuck out to me, scrolling past this tale (and as you may have noticed by now, this is a theme in a lotta my articles), was what social media connections had to say about it. I’d like to point out that term I just employed – “social media connections”. Because I’m getting further and further away from being willing to use the more succinct former one: “friend”. So “SMC” may be the new, improved, and more appropriate substitute for my… ehrhm…. less educated contacts. Yeah. I’m gonna use that from now on.
I’m also just gonna leave this here:
Another word on that new term – I like how it sounds like it could stand for “Subject Matter Clod” (versus “Subject Matter Expert”). That factors in nicely when it’s becoming glaringly clear to me that of these people who share controversial posts, nearly none of ‘em are reading the actual articles following the big bold letters-at-the-bottom-of-your-optometry-chart headlines. Some are good enough to add a “TL;DR-except-for-the-headline” on their posts. Thank you, you few. But others just go based off of hearsay (skim-spew? ‘cause they only skim pre-opinion spewing?) of others who’ve opined in their posts including the same tale. Fools gone viral. It might make a sexy T.V. show, if I could see enough through all this facepalm to discern for myself how deep and torrid this tale of infectious ignorance behind the news tale is.
At least I have to assume exactly that – pathogenic misinformation – is the problem here. Unless the supplemental info I’m seeing lately in these shares is a testament to my SMCs’ collective capacity for conjuring up Rowling level fantasy fiction for the sake of corroborating a conclusion they already drew long before even reading the story. So, I’m not even gonna insert in the status screen cap on this one. I’m going to post two things here. One is the copy/pasted status update of the SMC in question. The other? The link she shared. Your task, should you choose to accept it (and I hope you do!) is in the form of the following question: Can you tell me where in the story the “blond hair white woman” resides?
S.M.C:
So some lady saw a black man grab a blond hair white woman? Hmmmm this could’ve put a whole lot of black men in danger. Smh
Done yet? Is this your face too?
Am I the only one who doesn’t see how the former is an appropriate review of the latter?
For all my effort (which extended all the way to the big guns you lay people may know as the CTRL + F function), I couldn’t sniff out this “white blonde woman” in question. Or a white. Or woman. Or a blonde. What I did read was that a witness saw a no-racial-description-offered-in-the-media-story girl. A girl. The man’s race was offered because – when it looks like someone’s being forced into a car against their will (be they an octogenarian, martian, or a KinderCare escapee) we report it. Just in case. And then the police say, “Okay! We’ll ask people to look out for the man you saw. What’d he look like?” Since we’re mostly covered in skin (it’s only the largest organ of our body and external – making it easily identifiable #TMYK), whatever shade it is, is generally the easiest jumping off point. And the jumping that results with readers is the kind that ends atop a bandwagon. So, while I wish my SMC well, I more so wish her the willingness to take the time to break down the barriers of her own preconceived notions enough to read the whole story. Because I know her. And I know she’s smarter than the bare-minimum browse-and-share she’s doing. Some cops are good. Some are bad. But, nobody got hurt by either sort in this story. In fact, it turns out the whole thing was a “domestic dispute”.
Oh, and to answer your question:
Yes. The last update on this article came before she posted her status share.