Not too different from how American tabloids go on endlessly about celebrity divorce, weight gain, health problems, etc.: "Yes, they have millions of dollars and the world is plastered with Beautiful People photos, but are they really, truly happier and healthier than me??? Maybe not!!!"I was going through comments by me on Metafilter the other day and the above is something I'm happy I said. Unhappily, I also participated in a conversation I wish I hadn't participated in.
I wish I lived in a world where it was NOT true that one of the differences between The Haves and The Have Nots is that The Haves get to breathe generally cleaner air, which is part of what triggered me to comment:
'Wow, I am so lucky to have a body and to breathe and to be able to look at this.'I have a serious, life-threatening medical condition that involves serious respiratory issues. I was homeless at the time and being treated pretty abusively on Metafilter overall which, at least at that time, was frequently a fairly toxic environment.
Somehow my brain hears:
"Wow, I am so lucky to be the daughter of a millionaire and have nothing better to do than go wow, I am so lucky to have a body and be able to look at this."
So they were ragging on two teenagers who are famous mostly because both their parents are famous and it's possible one reason I jumped into the conversation was because that is something I find inherently offensive. I may have had this misguided idea that I could direct the conversation away from people shittily talking trash about a couple of kids and direct it to something more meaningful, like how these kids sound so clueless due to larger societal factors beyond their control.
I left several comments and it looks to me like the pattern of my comments is a typical pattern for me from my participation on Metafilter at the time: Me deflecting a lot of really shitty assumptions, subtext etc to say "No, don't hang your crap on me. No, don't do that shit to innocent teens because they happen to be famous. No, that wasn't what I meant, asshole."
It's probably just as well I am banned from Metafilter. Trying to give push back against their shit often left me feeling like the only thing that accomplished was getting me covered in their shit and didn't actually elevate the discussion, inject better values, enlighten anyone, etc.
The one highlight of the conversation is a remark by someone else:
I just realized they named the boy after mom and the girl after dad.Their parents seem like cool people. I honestly don't know enough about the kids to have any kind of meaningful opinion about them.
I wish I lived in a world with more walkable, mixed-use development and more cycling-friendly infrastructure. I wish I lived in a world where clean air that doesn't aggravate your respiratory problems was not something out of reach for so many poor people and where housing itself were not out of reach for far too many Americans.
Metafilter was the worst social experience of my life. I say this as someone who was sexually abused as a little girl.
I sometimes wonder if participating there will someday come back to get me crapped on some more should I ever have any kind of success and people go looking for dirt on me and decide something I said there is somehow evidence I am a terrible person and "No take backs" or otherwise trying to clarify that I was very ill, I was homeless, I was being actively bullied on the site and it was mod policy to encourage people to bully me and it sometimes felt like there just was no good way to engage with the site.
I wish I hadn't participated in that conversation. I wish I had just decided "Yeah, these SHITTY remarks about a couple of kids is just typical crap for Metafilter and I just want nothing to do with it."
I did eventually learn to stop being naively "helpful" in that way and stop assuming that people engaging in such shitty behavior are just like clueless children who don't know better and can be taught better.
I'm better about going (internally): I'm a mom, but I'm not YOUR mom.
Not my responsibility to clean up their shit while assuming they didn't really MEAN to be so awful. Some people actually do just LIKE hurting others and do it on purpose.
Metafilter has paid mods for cleaning up social shit on the site. They generally SUCK at their jobs or I wouldn't have been treated so horribly, but it was never my job to do what I was so frequently trying to do.