Drawing the line right about (here).
In my opinion, I believe that we did take the Harambe meme too far. We used our power of social media to demoralize the real issue at hand. First, we need to understand what the actual problem was. For those who do not know, a gorilla was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo because a child had fallen into his restricted area. The gorilla’s name was Harambe and, Harambe did not seem to be a threat according to visitors who witnessed his death. However, the zoo’s immediate reaction was to shoot the poor gorilla, after keeping it captivated from its primal home.
I am not a fan of zoos in the first place because I do not agree with the idea of keeping animals around for the purpose of display and performance for people. Personally, I believe it is wrong to hold an animal in a small area with limited food and capacity to live unless they are rehabilitating the animal and releasing him/her back into nature’s arms. Others may disagree, and that is fine.
However, the problem was that without second guessing an innocent animal died and people went a little overboard with some of the memes. I am not sure why people take things too far on the internet, I guess it may have something to do with the amount of access available to the public. Often information gets lost in translation or people want to be a part of the sudden ‘hype.’
On the one hand, the Harambe memes were able to reach a demographic upon whose filter bubble would not have necessarily been accessed before. People who do not look into social justice issues such as Harambe’s case may have not even been aware of his death and how it happened. Others have even compared Harambe’s death to that of African American’s that have been a victim of police brutality in the United States of America. Clearly, the memes were able to spread the information faster and allow for even some introspective arguments to arise. Others have even explained that Harambe’s death was significant to the idea of ‘acting without thinking.’ Therefore, I do not think that the memes were totally out of context. There is a line that needs to be drawn. And, that line is the meme indicated below. Some memes are taken totally out of context.
The meme below features a black woman and is captioned “They Shot My Husband.” The meme is extremely offensive, insinuating comments about the female’s weight, skin color — ultimately, comparing her to an ape. The person who published the meme is still unknown. However, the person recycled and disposed of in this meme is humiliated. The creator of the image below used an innocent woman and a ‘tasteless’ idea to construct something that he or she thought would be acceptable.
Image:
We do need to draw the line somewhere. The problem is that so many people have access to the internet that anyone can post online without the repercussions of being caught. In addition, we’ve almost become desensitized from a lot of social justice issues. I am curious, is there a way to filter out these kinds of memes? Or, will we just continue to be witnesses of this type of behavior? Perhaps, there is not much we can do. But, at least there are users who still speak up about these kinds of incidents (the posting of this meme).
