Trophies and Traffic Stops

[enna]

It's been a tense few days on Facebook for me. A number of my sensitive, liberally focused friends posted the story about Cecil the lion's illegal poaching. This story outraged me, as it does whenever I see stories of animals being hunted for trophies. I dislike the idea of hunting as a sport, but at least most hunting these days is for deer

Comments

[melissa_maples]

But what has frustrated me is the next day the onslaught of "yes but why are we not as enraged about the police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement as much as Cecil, he is an animal!" This pisses me off because A) it assumes I am NOT enraged about that

As one of my FB friends so eloquently pointed out, you wouldn't walk into an ALS fundraiser gala and start shouting 'WHAT ABOUT CANCER, YOU PEOPLE SHOULD BE MORE UPSET ABOUT CANCER, THERE ARE OTHER IMPORTANT DISEASES BESIDES ALS!'

Well, yes, there are other diseases besides ALS... but right this second we're talking about ALS. That doesn't mean we can't talk about cancer in another conversation or that it's not as important a conversation, but this conversation just happens to be about ALS. There's not only one conversation in this world - we can have many different conversations on different topics and they can all be valid.

[enna]

Yes, exactly. And it feels like you're also not going to somehow take some of that outrage from others and put it where you think it should go, you can't re-plant outrage, it must grow on it's own, all you're doing is watering down existing outrage because you feel it should be elsewhere.

[lorelei]

Moral Outrage -is- my Moral Outrage

[enna]

I usually only say something if someone else posts something and it's something I agree with I will comment saying as much, but then when someone else starts commenting after me as if my comments sparked it, then it is frustrating.

[lorelei]

I'm a big fan of the like button. And of the 'turn notifications off' function :)

I will get into something every so often, regret it every time :)

[enna]

I think it's that a lot more more people, including myself, felt comfortable posting about it, thinking it was uncontroversial to find this behavior wrong, whereas racially charged things often cause drama and people avoid it not wanting to deal with the comments. But we got them anyway!