The other day I opened up my email and there was a Facebook message
from a friend encouraging me to sign a petition boycotting the “I Hate Dogs”
Facebook page. There’s a Facebook page
devoted to people who hate dogs? Wow.
Of course, I had to see for myself, and the page looks like more of a joke than
a serious statement. The above and profanely amusing photograph was “shared”
from this page. Hey, I love dogs, and
most animals for that matter, and I abhor the mistreatment of any animal; but while it is bad taste
and maybe even a bit disgusting that there is a page that professes to hate
animals, is it something we should prohibit? I’m no civil liberties zealot, and
I understand the indignation that a Facebook page like this might generate, but
come on, maybe this is not our biggest problem. It reminds me of Nancy Reagan
with her infamous war on drugs. That ill-conceived campaign took the focus off
hard drugs, was a colossal waste of money,
and had no appreciable success at stemming the proliferation of hard drugs in
North America. At one point during the Reagan years, a New Yorker could be put
away in prison for life, simply for possessing a bag of weed, and that is just a
stupid waste of money. As I said, I went
to the Facebook page to see if the so called dog haters have crossed any lines,
but it looked more pro dog than anti dog. There are a lot of kooks using social media;
are we going to ban them all? Good luck. While even the implication of hatred
may not be a healthy sign for our culture, it’s a free country, right? I hate Barney the Dinosaur, but other than
calling him a purple blob of evil, I’ve never acted on my emotions. I think the
majority of the haters visiting that page are likely to be dog lovers who want
to express their outrage at such ignorance.
Still, there is an
awful lot of real hatred out there in the world, and as an international community,
I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of addressing it. Yad Vishem, never
forget. Post holocaust (which some haters still deny even happened) it has
become an underlying reminder, for Jews and everyone else, that hatred can and
does spread like wildfire. Never allow a Hitler to rise again, isn’t that the
message? Many of us assume such an atrocity could never re-occur in our
lifetime, but it has, over and over. Rowanda,
the Congo, Pol Pot, the Turks and the Armenians, the Bosnian War, Idi Amin, to
name but a few. Madness and evil abound. And then we have that NBA bozo Donald
Sterling, owner of the Clippers, admonishing his young girlfriend for
associating with Black men. As hard as
it is for me to believe, ignorance and racism are alive and well and flourishing
in North America. In general, I think we have done a pretty crappy job of
learning from our mistakes. Sadly, hatred and intolerance may be an
inextricable part of human nature, but I still believe good, loving parents, or
family members, or role models, and proper education ,will go a lot further to
combat hatred than will shutting down a Facebook page. Absolutely, shine a
light on evil; expose it, teach us the difference between right and wrong, and
then let us decide for ourselves how we deal with it. I believe love can catch
on like wildfire just as easily as hatred can. My self righteous rant du jour.
I WATCH THE BOOB TUBE
CAUSE I’M A RUBE, I LIKE TO WATCH THE EVENING NEWS
I WATCH THOSE IDIOTS
LIGHT THE FUSE AND EVERYONE IS SO CONFUSED
I DON’T SEE THE RAGE
ANYMORE
cho:
IF I HAD MERLIN’S WAND, WITH THE WAVE OF MY ARM
cho:
IF I HAD MERLIN’S WAND, WITH THE WAVE OF MY ARM
I’D BRING THE WHOLE
THING DOWN, AND START IT OVER AGAIN WITH LOVE, I'D START IT AGAIN WITH LOVE.
- Written
by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2014 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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