The Online Mousetrap

Posted on October 26, 2021 by jharrin4
I have a friend who in the last several months took up employment with the Southern Poverty Law Center. The job requires monitoring and infiltrating online sites that are possibly outlets for hate groups. By hate groups, I don’t mean websites that are populated by Chicago Bears fans hating on Green Bay Packer fans, or Star Trek fans hating on Star Wars fans or in either case, vice versa. Not that some fans don’t get rather vocal and toss invectives around targeting others who, while simply only expressing their preference for Captain Kirk or Han Solo, are subject to such vitriolic opposition to their very existence. Hate, The only emotion that seems to last, no? My friend happens to be a huge Chicago Cubs fan. However, I think this person bares no malice towards Chicago White Sox fans, although as we all know, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts and minds of some people? Don’t you just hate when…uh….well, certainly there must be something worth hating out there, right? I mean, come on, just look around. And don’t try and tell me you can’t think of  anything that qualifies for hating on. Look me in the eye and tell me you haven’t one iota of hate inside you. See! You can’t do it can you?! I thought so. You ran out of coffee and you goddam hate that, right? It’s raining and it’s such a hassle to have to carry an umbrella, much more so than anyone else in the world who has been caught in the rain but has no umbrella because it’s unaffordable or unavailable in the right color. Or your dog just shit the rug and it’s your fault not the dog’s I mean a dog has got to poop like every living thing poops but maybe it can’t be helped sometimes and if you cared more you’d have walked the dog but noooo, you are a human and the you hate picking up doodoo indoors or outside. So, now you hate me for making you confront yourself and finally realize who you are. I know, it’s a tough thing to do. But now you feel better about admitting you do hate something, with maybe that one thing being what I just made you understand about yourself and you’re thinking why am I still reading this bullshit blogger’s trickery and wordplay that now has me unable to look myself in the mirror without seeing a very horrible, no good, rotten, mean, nasty, cruel and inconsiderate person? Yeah. I got you, didn’t I? Haha! And for all I know you will now embrace the hate you didn’t know you had and maybe even cultivate it and let it grow into a raging hate, and maybe start a website to give your venal, vile and vicious hate an outlet in cyberspace, where my friend will eventually find you and document the hate you love to hate on. Yeah, that’s what my friend does, like I said when I started this piece, so why the hell couldn’t you see it coming? Ha! No, you just kept reading and without using the slightest bit the critical thinking just fell into my trap, like a mouse that mindlessly meanders along sniffing a bit of cheese only to get its neck broken trying to get that piece of cheese, and now that mouse is dead and it never hated anyone, hell no, it was an innocent mouse and for no good reason it died just trying find some food but didn’t think it through, since why would that piece of cheese just be sitting there in the first place, on some hateful contraption designed to express the hate most people have for mice, except the PETA people who think using mice in scientific experiments is wrong because mice have a right to live too, no, I mean c’mon, did the mouse ask to be born a mouse? I don’t think so. So, now you are aware of how hate can lead to death and that cheese kills mice and makes you fat, and I bet you hate knowing that as much as you like cheese you can’t just shove it in your mouth all day and not pay the price, though unlike that mouse you will die from that cheese but in very protracted manner, not just whack!, your neck was just broken and all you got was a small piece of cheese in your mouth before the lights went out but either way it’s a matter of being smarter about choices, so that the odds of being killed because you like this or that but this or that might be bad for you will preclude making the wrong decision like the people who decide that they want to broadcast their hate online and my friend will come across you and then you get busted and you and your hate are out in the open and that’s ironic because you thought you could hide online and my friend wouldn’t find you , ha!, you dope he gets paid to find you but probably not paid well enough to be exposed to hate as a day job, I mean good grief, how much hate can a person have to see, hear, watch everyday before that person becomes the thing that the job is meant to eliminate, and now where are we?

About jharrin4

mass communication/speech instructor at College of DuPage and Triton College in suburban Chicago. Army veteran of the Viet Nam era.
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