DO YOU KNOW A SOCIAL MEDIA BULLY?

I'm a fan of Ed Sheeran and listen to his music often.  He just seems like such a kind person from what I've seen, and his music is amazing. Imagine my surprise when he recently said in an interview with The Sun that he's quitting Twitter because he was cyberbullied by Lady Gaga's fans due to a misunderstanding.

Many took that to mean he was deleting his account.  What he really meant is that while there are plenty of positive things happening, he just want to focus on the things he enjoys seeing like Harry Potter.  He's not actually deleting his account.

Twitter can be super funny, but it can also go badly very quickly with 280 characters or less. 

As parents, we are horrified when our kids come home to tell us they have been bullied, and right away we want to fix it.  The thought of someone hurting our family physically or verbally makes us cringe inside.  In fact, according to www.standforthesilent.org,  55,000 children over the past 7 years have committed suicide due to bullying!

But when we as adults disagree with a political post, the shape of someone's body, a violent act, whether Ryan Lochte was or wasn't robbed, or if a singer lip synced on television, we lose our minds and go on the attack with perfect strangers!  No one is expected to agree with what everyone says - that's what makes the world go round, but dang it, why in the world do we start calling people hateful names or threaten to come to their homes and beat them up? 

The initial reason that I started using Facebook was to enter sweepstakes.  Then I realized there were a zillion authors out there that actually interacted with other readers.  Very cool! When I started this Blog, Social Media just seemed like the next step. Within this platform we see verbal attacks from authors to bloggers, political rants that are over the top, or people who don't like curvy women to post pics of themselves.  The list goes on and on and on. Facebook even has a page called Mean Insult Quotes with over 11,000 members.

Let's be honest.  Most people are not going to start a vicious fight in person due to a disagreement with someone else, but it does happen.  If we know that our views cause us to become passionate and crazy, we should do an Austin Powers and zip our lips.  That doesn't seem to happen with Social Media.  We type, the other person types, we think about typing, and then we're typing and sending again,  posting our feelings for all to see.  Forgetting that these heinous words depict portraits of our character as surely as if we wrote an autobiography. Those words will NEVER go away.

We shouldn't care if a person is pink or green, gay or straight, a little person or 7 feet tall, Catholic or Lutheran, curvy or thin. What should matter are our hearts and how we treat each other even when we disagree.

Each person has his or her own personal beliefs, and surely those points of views are not going to change when someone gets cursed out or degraded in print.  Some people deal with this by ignoring those posts, others jump on the bandwagon, and a few just get blocked.

But I go back to the fourth paragraph of this post.  We don't want to see our children, friends or family hurt by bullying, right?  Bullying in any way that it's done is abuse. It's painful, not funny or cute, 

and it's wrong.