The First Stone

Social media has always been vaunted as the means to connect us all. To turn the whole world into one vast social network where we can all revel in the unalloyed joys of immediate interconnectedness. Barriers will come down. Boundaries and borders will come to be meaningless, etc. 

And I’m sure that’s true in part and I’m all for it but there’s another side to social media that is making me extremely uncomfortable of late. The global kangaroo court culture that seems to be springing up. Nearly always fired up and stoked by traditional media outlets – newspapers and magazine articles – and usually targetted at sad individuals who have not merely broken some social taboo but – worst crime of all – have been caught and publically identified as doing so.

The killer of Cecil the Zimbabwean lion is a case in point.

Now let me make it clear that I abhore “sport” or “trophy” hunting. Of any kind. I don’t care whether you’re some Southern red neck who feels shooting bears is a tradional part of your culture / your right as an American to bear arms (or arm bears or shoot bears with arms) or if you’re a South African poacher whose sole earning potential relies on you supplying misguided Chinese doctors with rhino horn and tiger bone. Killing animals for no good reason at all is worse than criminal. Killing them at the behest of market forces is deplorable. Killing them for “the thrill” or for a misguided sense of “sporting achievement” is completely despicable. I don’t buy all this BS about the beauty and the skill of the hunt, etc. The thrill is sexual at some base level; some ego stroking catharsis that sees the testosterone driven huntsman masturbate live rounds into the flesh of some exquisite beast that he cannot otherwise tame, own or match.

I don’t much care for the apology that Cecil’s killer has offered to the world either; “he was sorry that he killed that particular lion”. As if all the other animals he and his kind have killed were somehow more morally palatable because they were not named or had not been adopted as some nationalist symbol. He is very sorry, I’m sure, that that particular lion’s death came endowed with so much media exposure and so many, many column inches. He killed a lion but has wounded himself. Badly.

But do we want the wound to be fatal?

See, I’m uncomfortable with the howling of the mob. The digital stoning that the hunter dentist is receiving. The screams of outrage. The death threats that have seen this man have to go into hiding, have to close down his business. While many people I am sure feel he does not deserve pity or mercy I, however, do not want to be party to a global culture that drops the equivalent of an atomic bomb of vitriol onto one single individual – as if we are, all of us, unimpeachable in our moral rectitude, as if we are all so righteous in our social standing that we have the right to dispense condemnation and judgement and to recommend lethal injection to those who offend us.

All from the comfort of our armchairs, inbetween surfing for pictures of Lady Ga-Ga / Justin Bieber and sharing the lastest meme about funny kittens on Facebook.

I felt the same when that poor science dude got publically excoriated for appearing on TV for wearing a shirt whose pattern design was made up of bikini-clad women. Sure, that does not compare to shooting a lion with a crossbow and letting it bleed to death for 40 hours but the howls of public outrage and indignation were much the same. The world spoke with one voice – one vast unthinking, rage-filled, knee-jerk propelled voice – and that voice was without mercy or consideration or humanity.

Lord knows we all have days when we feel like the entire world is against us… but social media can now make that proposition a very grim reality.

We all mess up now and again. Sometimes we spend vast tracts of our lives believing the wrong thing entirely until life or the universe or the deity of your choice sets us back onto the right track.

But imagine if we were condemned for it via social media, the newspapers, neon flashing lights, petitions, protest marches, movies, fatwas, campaigns, death threats, the mob outside our homes hefting huge rocks and baying for blood…

How can it be that social media makes a demand of us that we are all morally and irreproachably perfect on the one hand, but so easily turns us all into a blood-thirsty, vengeful mob on the other?

The Ghost Of Wayne Inglis

Looking back on it now it’s probably far more common than it felt at the time. The death of a fellow school pupil.

It was, I think, sometime near the end of my penultimate year at North Leamington school – so probably round 1984 – and I can remember the headmaster handing over proceedings for that morning’s assembly to Mrs Mordecai, our Hobbit-like French and Religious Education teacher. If he thought Mrs Mordecai would bring a more gentle ambience to proceedings he’d obviously never seen her in action during double French.

She delivered the news in a calm, measured, almost BBC manner.

Wayne had died at the weekend. Our sympathies went out to his parents and to his younger sister who would not be attending school this week.

And that was it.

No details. No explanation of how, why and where. Just that he’d died.

I remember feeling very shocked. Benumbed. Which struck me as odd because although Wayne was in my form we weren’t mates. We weren’t enemies either; he wasn’t that type of boy but he existed outside my tight knit circle of friends and I outside of his. He’d always come across as a little strange. Blonde and oddly Germanic looking. A neck that was slightly too long. In fact, for all he was not excessively tall, everything about him seemed slightly too long. Legs, arms and shoulders were all odd, awkward and angular. He had a smutty sense of humour that, because of the way he exercised it – huddled and whispered – seemed slightly unwholesome. He brought a key-ring into school once that, due to simple thumb operated mechanics, featured a couple that furiously copulated. He was that type of boy.

A bit strange but harmless. A bit of a joke really. But not enough to impinge much on anybody’s radar.

I can remember some of my peers laughing as we were dismissed from assembly. They found the news funny. I’d like to think it was down to shock but, no, they genuinely found it funny in that unfathomably cruel way teenagers have of misconnecting with the world and everything that isn’t actually about them personally. One girl actually voiced the opinion that she was glad he was dead because she never liked him anyway.

I through her a disgusted look but that was as far as it went. I was a shrinking violet and she didn’t care anyway.

Days later a few more details leaked out. Apparently Wayne had recently taken part in a charity parachute jump. He must have been so enamoured of the experience of floating down to earth that he’d tried to recreate the process in his bedroom with his parachute and a leap from the wardrobe. I kid you not. But for his resultant death it reads like a script from Some Mother Do ‘Ave ‘Em. Who knows if that was the true reason? We’ll never know. What was known was that Wayne was found tangled up in the parachute chords. He’d effectively hanged himself. I think the circumstances were such that it was plain it was not intentional.

It had a sobering effect on my school year for about 2 weeks. Until after the funeral, I suppose. Only his closest friends went. And then it seemed to get forgotten. We broke up for the summer holidays and when we came back we were 5th years with O levels and school leaving to look forward to. We had moved on.

Unlike Wayne. Unlike, I suspect, his parents and his sister.

I often think of Wayne now. It’s a minor sadness that nevertheless touches me deeply. I often wonder what he would have become if he had lived. What he would have done. Who he would have married. I can’t quite see him as a serious grown-up person doing a proper job at all.

In my mind he’s still playing with that blessed key-ring and giggling quietly to himself.

Letting Rip...

The call came through late yesterday afternoon. “Man unconscious on the floor of the baby change.”

I put the phone down with a weary sigh and performed a precautionary save of the revolutionary Word document I’d been working on all day which described a plan that, if implemented immediately, would save the council millions of pounds in these cash strapped times (sack ALL the managers and the executives. To be honest I’m not sure if my bosses will be willing to embrace this radical approach – curse them and their shortsightedness).

Great, I thought. Another vomit laced drunk with a scabby top lip and trainer bottoms that have failed to act as an emergency colostomy bag. I’ll have to call out the paramedics to scrape him off the floor.

I headed downstairs to investigate and for once was pleasantly surprised to find a young man in his early twenties merely asleep on the floor of our topnotch (cough!) baby change facilities. No smell of booze. No smell of vomit. No seepage of bum gravy warranting calls for BP to come in and clean up the immediate environment.

He was just asleep. Sound asleep. Breathing deeply and contentedly. His head lying on his carefully folded jacket and the nappy bin strategically placed between his head and the door so that should an unwary mother with a pewling toddler rush in to avail themselves of the baby changing mat he wouldn’t wake up to find his brains had been twatted out of his skull and splattered up the wall behind him.

Some considerable thought had obviously gone into this.

Although the phrase “let sleeping dogs lie” came into my head he just couldn’t stay there. This is a baby changing facility not a doss-house (Leamington’s drunks please take note).

So I tried to rouse him. I tried calling politely. I tried calling rudely. I tried shouting like Gerard Butler in 300 (this is not a youth hostel – THIS IS SPARTA!) but ol’ Rip Van Wrinkle wasn’t waking for anyone or anything. I even tried the old armpit poke but that had no effect whatsoever. He was so deeply asleep he was in danger of being kidnapped by 7 dwarves.

Part of me felt envious. As someone who is continually woken before 6am by my eldest boy bouncing action figures of the metal bars of his bunk bed I admired this youth's ability to shut out all external stimuli and remain furiously, passionately asleep.

Another part of me just thought he was a git and I therefore rang the police to see if a bit of politically incorrect truncheon action might encourage him to move on to his own bedroom or at least the nearest furniture store.

The police were amused and said they’d send someone out as “a priority but not an emergency”. I don’t blame them. It was plain this guy was in the best of health. He was just asleep. Asleep on the cold hard floor of a public amenity immersed in the sweltering odour of about 30 overflowing nappies.

While I waited for the police I thought I’d give waking Mr Sleepyhead another go. I returned to the baby change. I saw the sink in the corner and inspiration struck. A good handful of ice cold water was summarily dropped at great height straight onto Coma Boy’s head.

Boy did he wake up. I stepped back just in case he barked but he just looked nonplussed. He wiped his face and looked around at the immense puddle that had suddenly formed around him. I could see his brain formulating the question but thought it best not to be too forthcoming as to the source of the deluge.

I checked after his well being and suggested he move on. With much grunting (that surely only his mother could love) he concurred and shambled from the building a darn sight cleaner than when he came in.

I returned to the phone and called off the fuzz. I then returned to my Word document and felt... strangely buoyant. Strangely wired. It had been fun. I’d enjoyed it. Tipping water onto someone. Hmm.

Dear readers, I fear a cruel appetite has been awoken in me. Should you ever find yourself in my neck of the woods suffering from exhaustion or even narcolepsy don’t expect any sympathy or understanding from me. You see, I’m just waiting for the call. I have a large bucket under my desk now and a 2 litre bottle of water in the fridge. It’s chilling nicely.

And it has your name on it.