I have ideas in the morning, almost every day, they may not be good, but i have them.
today, i scrolled facebook like i generally do, and i saw the things i generally see, you know: ads for things i was talking about yesterday, people arguing about jambands, but for some reason i saw a lot of really repugnant things from my small, very white and weirdly republican hometown. for some reason, Plymouth, MA is a very red pocket in a state mostly known for being the most blue in the northeast. My mother actually calls our hometown “Alabama North”, for that very reason.
anyway, i thought i would turn into one of these people and post these kind of things without any explanation as a kind of satirical preformance art piece, it seemed funny. i took a temporary profile picture with a stupid filter, made sure a toilet was visible in the background, and put an american flag border on it. i went on the subreddit r/forwardsfromgrandma to get some pro-trump, anti-biden, anti-trans, right wing fear mongering memes and started posting them. i included youtube videos from Kid Rock, Jason Aldean and Pantera. i don’t know why i chose pantera, but people who listen to Pantera seem to think blue lives matter…maybe it’s my imagination.
i also wrote a few status updates about stuff like antifa, cancel culture and critisizing people on welfare who have the audacity to own cell phones. this is, i think, when i took it too far.
years ago, i was reading an article on the webpage of the Old Colony Memorial, which is the local news paper of Plymouth, Ma and the surrounding towns of the South Shore. The article was about the epdiemic of fatal opiod overdoses in Brockton, Ma, which might be the newark of the south shore. I read the comments section. someone said something to the effect of suggesting a limit for narcan, the drug that reverses an overdose and grants the person who is overdosing another chance at surviving the overdose. I will never forget this comment, it was something like “narcan should be like baseball, 3 strikes and you’re out”. what an awful thing to say, like drug addicts are some subhuman garbage that should be discarded, and not…you know, someones child, sibling or significant other. also, i thought about how that would work logistically, would the first responder say “oh, well Jimm’ys narcan card has been punched too many times, too bad, we gotta let him die”
so, i copied that comment about narcan, and posted it as if it were my opinion… i was pushing people’s buttons out of boredom, and just to be offensive for the sake of it. Of course i don’t think that, that’s one of the most deplorable things i’ve ever seen anyone say on the internet, and that says a whole lot. I didn’t think anyone would take it literally, i mispelled the contraction “you’re” on purpose, just like the original author of the comment. People we’re outraged, and rightfully so, i went too far with that.
for the record, i could not disagree more with the things i posted in jest. I think that everyone deserves not only as much narcan as they would ever need, but access to treatment to recover from addiction without any concern for what it costs, even if it requires medication assited treatment. without these things i wouldn’t be here typing this. i also firmly believe in harm reduction for those who aren’t at the point of getting clean, and a complete decriminalization of the posession of all drugs. People are going to do drugs no matter what, i think we should make it safer. Addiction isn’t a criminal matter, it’s a public health issue, and all of the jail cells in the country aren’t going to solve it. society should be compassionate and logical with it’s approach to drugs and drug addiction.
in retrospect, facebook is not the place for that kind of dark, subtle humor. i deleted all of that stuff, and clarified that i was only being a troll.
