I’ve been spending way too much time reading social media this week, maybe because I’ve been sick, or maybe I’m a slave to the bug that makes so many people feel tied to their electronic devices (this makes sense given my “former” gaming addiction). Either way, instead of just reading an article or blog, I’ve felt some disturbing need to read the comments sections. I mean, where else can you find out that our “president hates our country and wants to give it to his Muslim brethren” or “all liberals are retarded” or “all conservatives are bullies?” Believe me, I had to censor this, some of it just hurts my eyes.

What stuns me the most is that people don’t seem to actually read the stuff they’re commenting on anymore. Or, they’re reading it with such a cynical eye that nothing else gets through. Of course we shouldn’t believe everything we read, but it sure seems like the sides have already been picked, and the rest is just the taunting, thrown back and forth between sides like those jellyfish I remember from that really nasty jellyfishy beach I spent one weird day at when I was a kid… (well, surely you can imagine people throwing jellyfish at one another on a beach, can’t you? ::shudder::).

Still, the geek in me (stand back, I’m about to do science!) knows that before there can be reaction, there has to be action. Someone is pulling the strings in your life, and if it’s not you… well, you know, it’s not you. It seems like only a few people see themselves as actually capable of taking action on their own. And the rest? Well, I love the term “tool” as an insult, but it seems like most people I see commenting on these articles and blogs are the other kind of tool, just throw a switch and they’ll go to work like nanobots following a program laid out for them by… well who knows who wrote what? And well, whoever it is making people react these ways, I’d like to learn their secrets, because if I can’t make the world a better place, then I could at the very least use some adorable minions.