No matter what happens in today’s social media age, anything and everything will be politicized in one way or another.
Some issues do need to be politicized immediately to garner attention and for politicians and other powerful figures to take action. Take the recent #MeToo hashtag, in light of the Harvey Weinstein and others’ sexual harassment and assault accounts, and the numerous motives to change our healthcare bill that are blowing up right now. Both need politicizing to help garner attention to policies that absolutely need to be revised or rid of.
However, there are events that need times of grievances before anyone dares make it an example to further a political agenda, whether it be “right” or “wrong.”
The recent mass shooting in Las Vegas is a perfect example of a tragedy that has been over-politicized. The shooting left 59 individuals dead with over 500 others injured. While some were sending prayers and condolences, some people took the first 24 hours to shove gun control debates down everyone’s throats and post about how “prayers and thoughts are nice, but we need to do something now to solve anything.” This does have some merit, where most mention that delaying conversation is too late of action for the victims of the mass shooting.
Of course, this is not to say that we should all together not talk about gun control in light of the biggest mass shooting in our country’s history. The problem is that it seems that we do not give the loved ones of victims time to grieve before politicians use the victims as a statistic, rather than degrading others for treating the affected individuals like actual human beings.
This is also not to say that we should be silent or that we should not politicize it at all. After this shooting, we do want solutions and answers to help prevent any shooting of this level to happen again, and that does involve talking politically about changing or uprooting current policies to better our future and the future of others. However, when it comes to these tragedies, there should be a “too soon” timeframe that should be respected by everyone for grieving individuals.
Do not mistake anyone who asks for time before debate as someone who does not want change and as someone who does not want to find the solution to a major problem. They are simply trying to grasp the problem and breathe so that they can better understand how to fix it in the very near future.
