Ignorance Is Not Bliss

Social media has become a place where anyone with a highly charged opinion can find an instant audience amongst the author’s peers.  The virtual soapbox where firebrands can expose and wax poetic on the truly important subjects and questions of the day.  The place where the spark of a new ideal can lead to the fires of revolution and dramatic change.  Mind you this is what social media idyllically has become after years of evolution and cultivation of it as a tool.

Unfortunately, this is what social media has become:

1)      Paranoid rants about how good things use to be or how it was never like this before so why should things be this way now.

2)      Blanket statement of blaming a person, place or thing without welcoming discussion on how to change said person, place or thing

3)      A random assortment of hypercharged posts about announcements or declarations that have not been confirmed or, most of the time, are not even true.

Now, I’m not saying that every post that goes onto social media has to be the highest quality of content and tripled source checked before being posted to the Interweb.  I mean, I like mindless memes just like the next person; however if you are going to be posting political declarations or the like some source and fact checking might be in order.

The social media channels are starting to be plagued with posts from people who are making up complete fabrications of how our government works.  For an instance, the other day I ran across a post that stated that State’s Attorney Generals were going to prosecute President Obama for “making up laws” that go “against the Constitution”.  This statement was going around Facebook, a lot, and in the body of its declaration it claimed to be from Fox News and that the “Facebook police” were going to be “pulling it down soon” so it was imperative to repost said nonsense immediately and keep spamming your feed with it so they couldn’t censor the information.

Because I didn’t want to seem like I was making this shit up I present for you a copy of the post that was floating around Facebook over the last week:

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OK, BREAKING NEWS...BREAKING NEW....THIS IS WHAT I SAW AND HEARD ON FOX NEWS A FEW MINUTES AGO....THE ATTY. GENERAL OF TX, GREG ABBOTT, SAID THAT HE AND 11 OTHER ATTY. GENS. HAVE FILED CHARGES AGAINST OBAMA FOR WRITING HIS OWN NEW LAWS WITHOUT CONGRESSIONAL APPROVAL...WHIC H MEANS HE HAS BEEN BREAKING THE LAW AND TRYING TO CHANGE OUR CONTITUTION BY DOING SO....SO THEY HAVE FILED THE CHARGES AND THIS IS FIRST STEP FOR IMPEACHMENT OR AT THE VERY LEAST THAT OBAMACARE IS AGAINST OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS....HE CHANGES THE LAWS TO SUIT HIMSELF AND THE ATTY GENS AND THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE SICK OF HIM ACTING LIKE HE IS KING OBAMA....

Let’s let this sink in for a second….if you paid attention to….oh I don’t know….high school….you will find that everything in that declaration ri-god-damn-diculous!  I get that people don’t like that their government is telling them that they have to have insurance.  I understand that.  But for FUCKS SAKE COULD YOU PLEASE JUST FOR FIVE SECONDS FUCKING GOOGLE JUST THE FUCK HOW OUR GODS DAMNED GOVERNMENT ACTUALLY FUCKING WORKS!!!!!  FUCK!!!

Sorry…..I do apologize.  I realize that I have a tendency to fly off the handle a bit.  But, I’m calm now.  I’m good.  It’s…ok.

………….

Nope, fuck that it’s not.  Seriously if you have not one fucking clue as to how the government actually works you should lose all right to bitch about it.  You know, I actually wish I was actually kidding about that.  If you think that the President of the United States just makes laws up you should not have the ability to complain about anything…ever.  Because you are an idiot.   Seriously.  I’m not even going to sugar coat that one.  If you really believe that the President can make up laws I pray you don’t have children.  No…that’s harsh.  I pray your children actually pay attention in 5^th grade social studies and don’t rely on your concepts of American Government.

As most people who paid attention in school know, the President is the Chief Executive of the United States government.  That means he enacts the laws that have been voted on by Congress, which is the Legislative body for the United States government.  We have these things called branches of our government and each one is responsible for a system of checks and balances that keep our representative democracy spinning right along.  The President can’t make a law, he can only enforce the ones that have been voted on.

The common misconception that most angry white people and uneducated blowhards make is they think that Executive Orders are a form of a law.  This is very incorrect; an Executive Order is a order from the President to the other departments within the Executive Branch.  Here’s the best part, if an Executive Order has no legislative backing, Congress and the Supreme Court can take point against said order and actually reverse said Executive Order.   

Since this particular inaccurate rant specifically mentions ObamaCare as its target I can only assume that the uneducated originator of this message is assuming that ObamaCare is a “law” that was “enacted” by the President via Executive Order.  Congress, you know that branch that makes laws, voted into reality.  So, Obama isn’t making any laws….

Then there’s the bit about the whole Attorney Generals of the U.S. are banning together to blah, blah, blah, blah.  Again….5^th grade social studies.  Greg Abbot is the State of Texas Attorney General which means that he is responsible for upholding the prosecution of the laws of the State of Texas and not any Federal laws.  He, or the other State Attorney Generals would be wanting to uphold the laws of their State and have now jurisdiction over Federal laws.  This is just common sense.

This brings me a long way to my point.  Common fucking sense.  Good fucking netiquette.  Not just randomly posting stuff that you wish was true and propagating it as the verifiable truth.  And then, when you are called to the mat on what you posted and it is pointed out as being full of shit – please keep your anger and indignation to a polite and respectful minimum in deference to the fact that the rest of the internet paid attention in school.  And you did not.