i gathered all of the things in the kitchen that contained aspartame, put them on the kitchen table, and then printed off 4 articles about how poisonous it is and highlighted all of the most important information…
this is a post my wife, lauren, made yesterday that caused some pretty intense outrage on tumblr. this is her personal blog, and she uses it to talk about what she does during the day. it’s one of those blogs littered with photos of kittens and baby deer and animated gifs from grey’s anatomy and degrassi. she gets a lot of attention, however, because she runs ‘greenstate’ (formerly ‘stfuTeabaggers’), which has somewhere between five and six thousand followers.
this was an innocent enough post about what she did that day. maybe she was hoping to commiserate with one of her internet friends who had been in a similar situation. this post now has fifty notes, and, so far as i can tell, all but one of them are insanely negative, ignorant and hateful.
lauren and i have been trying to get my parents to stop consuming aspartame for at least a year now. every time we see them with a diet coke we remind them, and the response is not defensive, but rather that they just ‘forgot’. this is terribly frustrating, and honestly, we have no other motivation than their health. my mother has ulcerative colitis and my father a history of not very nice cancer (he is approaching the age at which his own father died).
one person who has something of an internet relationship with lauren reblogged this giving her a hard time about being a ‘guest’ in their home and it spun out of control from there. i grew up here, and we’ve been staying here since may (as much as i hate to admit it). lauren has been in my family for three years now, and they are as much her parents as they are mine. her only motivation is their health, and i really appreciated her concern.
the reaction from the tumblr community yesterday was one of the most embarrassing displays i can remember.
- ‘worst guest ever, worst PERSON EVER. What would prompt you to do something so tactless?‘
- ‘Holy crap, rude much? You’re a guest in their house…’
- ‘…I don’t like people rummaging through anything.’
- ‘Today in “ordinary human beings acting like shits - it’s not just for congressmen!’
- ‘I think the appropriate response is to leave your belongings in the front yard…’
- ‘This. Is. Horrible. I would never, ever invite a person like this back to my house EVER. My health is nobody’s business…’
what a waste of hundreds of thousands of years of human innovation. it bothers me more than i can say that certain tumblr users can’t speak their minds for fear of being attacked. i honestly cannot believe some of these reactions. these are the kinds of completely asinine utterances no one in their right mind would have the guts to say to anyone’s face (especially when they’ve not met), but the relative anonymity of the internet - the lack of that filter most of us use when face-to-face - occasionally yields a hugely destructive (and embarrassing) mob-mentality. you can say whatever you want because the people in your computer aren’t real. what a petty way to feel good about yourself. anyone who says that the computer hasn’t affected our generation in a truly negative way has never been on tumlbr.
i really do appreciate the tumblr communities to which i belong, and how positive they are; how devoid of this garbage.
