Vitaly Podvorchan, Period 7, 3/15/2023

 I believe that these issues are so prevalent in our society and really only getting worse because of how so many people in our society tend to be reactionaries and the echo chambers people surround themselves in. Many different groups of people with different political ideologies will (obviously) tend to flock to people that also believe in their cause. It makes sense, why would you bother interacting with someone who disagrees with you? I think this causes such a disconnect in today's politics and the issues we see. Being online essentially everyday I believe has slowly degraded people's moral compass and ethics. For instance, I would scroll on my twitter timeline and see news of a Transgender teenager hate crimed and led to suicide simply because people disagreed with their personal choice of becoming comfortable in their own body. When seeing such news, you would expect ANYONE with some sense of rationality to feel remorse, no matter what your view on being transgender is. No child (or adult) should be ridiculed and killed for expressing themselves in a way that harms no one around them. But I click on the news story and the top comment I will see will more than likely be something along the lines of disrespect to the victim. People will set up accounts where all they do is post screenshots of people in distress and laugh at the situations they are in just because they disagree with their ideology. Another problem I take from this is how desensitized we’ve become to some hate speech because of how common it is, but this is also the fault of the social media companies and people themselves. Hatred is a strong emotion, and social media capitalized on this. The top comment on a post on Twitter will usually be the replies with the most replies and not the most likes, signifying this comment has brought lots of controversy and discourse. The privacy of having your identity being hidden by a screen makes people a lot more confident then they would ever act in real life. You can take out all your anger on random people when you see something you slightly dislike and you will never be reprimanded for it. I have seen threads where the first comment would simply be something harmless like “Cute Cat!”, then 500 comments in between, and then the most recent comment is “I bet you support genocide”. How did we even get to that?

It’s always so tiring to see so much random discourse over the smallest things in our society simply because we disagree. My experiences of always seeing this happen has led to me view life on a more “let people do what they want” philosophy (granted they're not harming anyone). I truly don't understand how someone can cower behind a religious text and use it to preach hatred for someone loving their own sex or wanting to change their sex. Being indifferent in these situations is also a problem. I see so many people sometimes say “I’m not picking a side!”, but by not picking a “side”, are you really not just siding with the oppressor? By letting the oppressor go unchecked you are just letting it happen and letting more victims face such oppression.