The shots that were fired at former US President Donald Trump and into a crowd of his supporters in Pennsylvania over the weekend have been felt around the world. The incident has left residents in northern Alberta’s Lakeland region feeling as confused, angry, scared and bewildered as anyone else , anywhere else in the world learning about the tragedy.
How does a senseless death and the collateral injuries caused during an attempted shooting of a high-profile US politician connect to a rural Albertan thousands of miles away? In the same way it is linked to the reason for the shooting itself; the knee-jerk acceptance, visceral objection, and the lowered bar of acceptable responses to opinions seen everyday thanks to social media, the internet in general, and people who use it as their own stage to stir things up.
It is a world where people can say whatever they want. Obviously, it’s always been that way … there was just never so much immediate access to all those people before the internet.
Democrats, Republicans, immigration, Trudeau, NDP, oil and gas, grocery store prices, Ukraine, rainbow crosswalks, Palestine … the list of topics and trigger-points is endless.
The internet, and its global access, provides too much information, and provides some people the un-restricted ability to feed their own views to the world while attracting others. For most people – most moderate, rational people –information can be taken or left, it can be analyzed if it is pertinent, or discarded if it isn’t.
But most people aren’t all people.
People who were already hostile, or those simply looking for a fight, or trying to find like-minded souls, have weaponized what should have been an amazing digital revolution – and the weapon is getting more deadly every day.
The internet has made it OK to openly criticize others for their thoughts. Whether its politics, global conflict or Taylor Swift, hostility can and does erupt and spread.
Often, the culprits are anonymous trolls, more interested in the fight than the issue, but in more recent times, the instigators – or sources – have been people of influence, people who should know better … but don’t – because the responses – for and against – become a performance measure.
People have become so over-rewarded by saying whatever they want, that it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some will respond by doing whatever they want.
It’s the horrifying natural progression of the instant world that has been created.
No one deserves to be shot for who they are. No one deserves to be shot for what they say or what others say about them.
But they are – whether it's on a political stage in Butler, Pennsylvania last weekend or on a dark rural road in Alberta’s Lakeland in 2020.
