As I begin writing this column, the sky is blue, the sky is bright and the few clouds overhead are all wispy and impossibly white. Usually, on a day like this, my mood is as bright as the sky itself.
Usually.
But today, I must confess to having a bit of cloud cover in my heart, a heaviness of emotion that feels a lot like a dreary, drizzly, gray day. Mind you; I know exactly where it stems from. Social media has been awash for a few days now with videos that break my heart and make me fear for the future of our land.
The first was a video of a young Black man accosting a white kid in school. The kid was sitting there listening to something on his earbuds, and out of the blue ended up getting beaten senseless and assaulted with a metal chair. The second was of a 9-year-old white girl on a school bus also being beaten senseless by two Black boys, one of which was a towering 15-year-old. The third was of a frail, elderly white lady in a wheelchair in a nursing home yanked out of the chair by her hair and beaten by a Black lady who worked there. To make matters worse, that one was followed up by someone online saying, “Context, please,” as if any context in the world could ever justify elder abuse.
The reason that all of this weighs on me may surprise you, though. It does not bother me because I think it is epidemic; it bothers me because I know that it is not epidemic. It bothers me because I know that there are people who are actually promoting such hatred to try and make it epidemic. It bothers me because I see all of that online, and yet 99.9999% of the time, I have seen the exact opposite in my daily life of 52 years.