Remember back when the days of social media consisted of making your sibling get off of the house phone so that you could dial-up to AOL Chat? Or logging onto Myspace to check to see if lil' shawty from Arizona hit you back yet? I mean, the biggest dilemma you had was trying to explain to your homeboy, who you hooped with every day, why he wasn't in your top friends.
These days there's no telling what you'll get sliding down your timeline. Videos of students fighting teachers, brothers standing in the middle of the street, flashing guns and money. Social media challenges have replaced homework because let's face it, there's more family involvement there with the hope of going viral. The invasion of your personal and private cyber life. At least once every couple of months, we're all tuned into another episode of DM Gone Wrong: Celebrity Edition, waiting to see what new juice leaks out. Ready to start generating the memes and hashtags—the viral assaults—as if we never made a mistake ourselves. And for what? Likes? Just to be seen and possibly go viral in hopes to get a check?
The President of the United States won't hold a press conference and do his job but will tweet until his screen cracks. But see, that's all a part of the plan. To create drama. Create total chaos. In the '60s, it was about education, but the mass of African-Americans aren't too interested in reading these days. So the focus shifted.
Black folk love drama. From Twitter beef, Facebook thuggin and Instagram trolls. Isn't it amazing how we can walk past Pookie & Day Day arguing on the street, but the moment Drake and Meek Mill went at it, it was instantly trending? On sight, text to friends were sent, Tweets slamming both of them, the comments, memes, parody videos…you name it. Beyonce put up a picture of newborn twins and broke the internet! It's almost as if this is the modern day project housing experiment, only this time with the media. We spend the majority of time with our heads down, looking at our phones, then we do paying attention to what's going on. Even in a room full of friends, we're more consumed with "getting the right" picture to post, that we forget to actually enjoy the moment. I was recently reading a study about Social Media Depression. It stated that the use of multiple accounts could cause anxiety, having to keep up with updating them and all. To what I agree – to some extent.
Social media has led us to believe that just because you have a picture of it, that you actually have it. We put on these fake personas of who we want to be perceived as rather than who we actually are. Burying ourselves in debt just to raise our follower count. Fashion and social media have become the drugs, and the media is its pusher. It's an ever revolving system, and we still haven't figured it out yet. Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X. and John F. Kennedy are three prominent and influential leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. All media giants in their own way, all three killed. They were pulling the people together; fighting the power! However, it was their media influence that was the problem. So, the focus shifted, and the media and TV took center stage first.
We now have shows like Love & Hip Hop and Basketball Wives. Grown women on national TV, fighting and throwing drinks on each other. Black men pridefully disrespecting females all simply for a check. Could it be that we're perceived as animals to the rest of the nation because that's all we really see? While Donald Trump is tweeting like a 5th grader and getting full-time news coverage with all of his Russian business, nothing else is really being talked about! There's no splash of noise about the water crisis in Flint. Nothing is being done about the police shootings of innocent black people in the street, except a hashtag and a meme. Even with video footage and being shared across every social media platform, still #NoJustice #NoPeace. The NRA issued a video that essentially the shootings of innocent, unarmed protesters, yet no reprimanding issued. The focus goes from the real problems that Americans are facing (i.e. Chicago), to one that we only have to worry about for 4 years; if that long.
Imagine what would happen if we took a stand as a community and stopped treating each other like animals? If instead of gladly claiming to be a "Side-Chick of Charlotte", why not go get your own? Next time you think about leaving that sour comment under a pic, don't. I'd rather see a video of you teaching your son how to hoop or tie a tie, your daughter doing her hair or simply just doing what kids do than to watch a video of two 14-year-olds fighting in the street. How can we expect to promote the exact opposite of what we preach?! You can't explain to a teenage boy in America not to cheat on a woman when the both of you are watching Stevie J pimp out his wife and mistress, laughing about it on a reality tv show where it's real people's lives. Our focus is off. Trump won because they needed a way to stop President Obama's wave from growing. He brought hope, and with hope comes prosperity.
Donald Trump is now leading the social media charge. And while we're all treating each other like animals all over Facebook, Twitter, IG and Snapping, the Zookeeper is just sitting back enjoying the exhibit.
