Goodbye, logic
There are 7.5 billion of us on this planet right now. Out of which, less than 350 million are active on Twitter. And yet, tweeps continue to decorate the interiors of their bubbles by believing that they are not only the world but also its spokespersons. Which is fine, to be frank, given words don’t mean anything unless they are crystallized into actions. What’s the harm in freedom of speech? Well, this decade-old fad of making noise for self-aggrandizing purposes had led to a stage where hashtags and labels have stolen the mic. In such a pitiful scenario, logic takes a recess, never to return. Hypocrisy smugly takes its place.
For the record, hypocrisy is all around us, some in small bits and others in massive turds. You can’t escape it for a very simple reason: You can’t escape yourself. How we observe is what we truly are. The height of being hypocritical is when you argue something with one set of logic and then argue something polar opposite with the same set of logic. You can’t reach VT on a Churchgate-bound train. You’ve got to choose one path. And that’s something the self-appointed intellectuals fail to admit in the online circus of public discourse.
Take for instance the hashtag #NotAllMen. It always crops up as soon as men in general are reminded of the gross misconduct against women in general. If a rape takes place and some well-meaning souls call for introspection from men—how many sexual assaults do men suffer, statistically speaking?—then quite a lot of men get their knickers into a dramatic twist. They act like they’re being unnecessarily dragged and boxed when they themselves haven’t done anything wrong. True, they haven’t, but the fact remains that the responsibility for this problem lies with men. If men can claim glory over the achievements of ‘mankind’, then they can clearly take the knocks for its downsides too. Ideally, they should be offering the step forward in creating space for dialogues, and hopefully, a future where patriarchal bullshit chokes to death. But that’s far from happening because these allegedly sensible men get extremely sentimental instead of supporting the discourse. Before listening to what’s wrong, they brandish the #NotAllMen hashtag; which is basically a blanket ban on the topic. In other words, “I’ve got nothing to do with those rapes and violence against women. Please leave me alone!” Sadly for them, patriarchy, like climate change, is for real. There’s no point running around the fountain hoping to stay dry. Human history indicates the societal conditioning that makes men assume they are better than women, when that’s clearly not the case. Both are equally horrible. Unless we accept the existence of a rot, we won’t be able to address the cure. Ever.
So far, so ohmygoodness!
Now, let’s walk through a recent tragic event. Last month, a suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester left 22 people dead and 59 injured—a majority of them teens. As soon as the news broke out and it was confirmed that the perpetrator was a Muslim, another hashtag, #NotAllMuslims, raised its head. This jerk-reaction is palpable to some extent. Besides, Islamophobia is a reality but then, so are so many other phobias related to religion. None of the faithville is perfect albeit some do presume they are thanks to their superiority complex. As expected, instead of making room for discussions, and hopefully reformations, the door was tightly shut against the curtain of paranoia. The mainstream media, the apparent vanguard of sanity, got so busy blaming everything else—from misogyny to the skimpy clothes Grande wears on stage to Brexit to Syria — that they couldn’t dare to utter the I-word. Last checked, it was 2017 and still people tend to believe that the fastest growing religion is too meek to protect itself. And then ISIS claimed responsibility, armtwisting the media to focus on the “brainwashing” aspects of the attack. The amount of obstructionism at play was ludicrous if it weren’t for those who lost their lives for no reason. If the influential voices aren’t going to employ their words in the right direction, then who will? How long before this self-imposed political correctness devours whatever good is left in the modern era? Maybe, just maybe, maintaining an appearance is more essential than solving a problem. One pound of tokenism, please! Apparently, holding out a mass candle vigil is much more important than addressing the root cause of such cowardly attacks. As is the case with events of similar nature, the word ‘justice’ doesn’t apply to the grieving family members. They are quickly forgotten by the narrative.
Since we started with Twitter, let’s go back to it. It’s not like Twitter is changing the world with its 140-charactered-prison of words. Nope. But we’ve got to give it credit for helping us document the change in the world. It’s a great instrument for allowing us to observe how the supposedly greater mortals, who influence the change in the first place, are just like the rest of us. Flawed and masked.
