Harambe A National Hero
On May 28, 2016 a three-year-old boy climbed a wall at the Cincinnati zoo, and fell into a gorilla enclosure. Harambe, a 440 LBs Silverback gorilla, was very interested in the child, so he went over to the child who was splashing around in the moat at the bottom of the cage. After about 10 minutes of yelling from the onlookers, Harambe grabbed the child and started to drag him around the cage, into his habitat. Once Harambe Had the boy on the dry ground of the Gorilla Habitat that is when local emergency people as well as the zoo employs decided it was time to end Harambe’s life, in order to protect the child.
The choice to Shoot Harambe and kill him is the reason why Harambe has become a national icon. Many people argue, me included, that there was no need to shoot and kill this animal, you where in a zoo and had access to many other none lethal ways of solving this problem. I don’t agree with how they handled this, but I do understand, this was the safest course of action for the child. If they where to have shoot Harambe with a tranquilizing dart, like many people suggested, who knows what negative reaction he could have had after being shot, could easily have accidentally kill the kid. I believe the most outrages part about this is that a 4 year old boy was able to climb into a cage with 3 silverback Gorillas. with only a three-foot fence and some bushes as a barrier, it hardly seems like enough of a barrier between zoo patrons and wild animals.
Harambe Memes
The outrage of this story stared immediately after people heard about it. Change.org put a petition online for people to sign, that would have authorities hold the parents of the child who fell in responsible for Harambe’s shooting. In two days this petition got 338,000 signatures.
In the time this petition was circulating the first memes about Harambe started to come out. The first ones were the ones putting him in pictures with other very famous people who had already died this year (such as the meme on the left).
This was just the start of Harambe’s rise to stardom, in the next few months this dead Gorilla will become a national treasure, and a National symbol.
“Dicks out for Harambe”
A good meme chain needs that starting meme, that everyone finds kind of outrageous, but at the same time you find it funny and entertaining. The meme train really started once @sexualjumanji posted the tweet on the right. This prompted Brandon Wardell to post a tweet saying.
He later posted a Vine with Danny Trejo (the guy from Machete) with both of them saying Dicks out for Harambe. Within 5 days this vine got upwards of 2.2 million loops, 1,100 likes and 700 ravines. (http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harambe-the-gorilla). This is the definition of going viral. This is what really introduced the world to Harambe, and started the Harambe meme excitement Here are some of my favorite memes that where created.
This last meme to the right illustrates the reason I am writing about Harambe and the memes which have encapsulated him in history. I am a baseball player and our baseball team had a team chat, for the last half of our season Harambe memes was the favorite post in our chat. These memes kept our team laughing, and brought us together, for as silly as these memes are, they still bring out the proper ideas. Humans need to realize that we are not the only animals in the world, and we have a right to protect all other animals to the best of our abilities. Yes, there may have been very few options to save this kid from the gorilla, but there where some which could have saved Harambes life. I hope people and Zoos have learned from this situation and, hopefully they prevent anything like this from every happening again.
Information gathered from this website http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harambe-the-gorilla
