Did we go too far with the Harambe memes? Where do we draw the line?

The Harambe memes took place around May 2016 where a young boy accidently fell into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati zoo. In fear that the young child would be in danger, a zoo keeper shot the gorilla (Harambe). From this point on there had been pictures, videos and posts about the incident along with the hashtag #RIPHarambe. This became a huge trend on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook where people would show their sympathy towards the animal by posting pictures of the animal and hash tagging. However, over time people began to make a joke out of it. Examples of this include a tweet and a picture of Gorilla glue which says,” they call it gorilla glue because Harambe was metaphorically the glue that held this nation together”. Now the tragic incident had now turned into a recurring joke rather than another example of animal cruelty. Moreover, near the end of 2016 this “joke” had still been going on with memes about “Legends that died in 2016”. This meme took all the talented artists such as Prince and David Bowie and also incorporated Harambe into the post. Due to posts like this, this ties into the question, did we go too far with the Harambe memes and where do we draw the line? First off, yes people did go way to far with the Harambe memes. I understand that some things that are bad can be laughed off with a meme. However, there’s a limit to how far you should take it and if it’s appropriate to even make it into a meme. Typically, with a meme it will only last about a couple of months and will eventually die down. With this Harambe trend, more and more memes just kept piling it and became less “funny” and even more sad. There was no limit for people. They just kept turning away from this tragic incident and forgetting the fact that we killed an animal for no good reason at all. The person at fault here should be the mother not watching her child. The gorilla did drag the boy but he did not harm him anymore than that. Also the fact that people are making a joke about all this is sickening. In my opinion, I did not find the Harambe memes funny at all. The first time a saw the meme was on Twitter and I had no clue what they were talking about. All I was multiple tweets about this “Harambe” and I had no clue what it was. I went and did a little research to find out about this meme. What I found was a link to a video on YouTube of a young boy stuck in a gorilla enclosure. I didn’t laugh at this video at all, because a 3-year-old boy could’ve died. After this, I went back on Twitter to see if there were any more memes out there and of course there were. People from all over just kept posting and posting about the death of this gorilla. There was no end to it. Drawing back to the question, where do we draw the line? We as a community control the media. We can’t let the media control us. We have to be the line that puts a stop to the foolish jokes. Since social media is fairly new, we are all immature on the way we use it. I think it is time we mature our social media behaviours.