Love, In Other Words - Greeting Card Fiasco

The GREETING CARD FIASCO

It started with a blank greeting card…

I honestly do not know if it has always been this way & I’ve just never experienced it before or if it’s just a recent phenomenon. Maybe I am just naïve but when did Australians just get so downright nasty?

Now I’ve been a citizen of the World Wide Web almost from its inception. I will proudly declare my vintage by confirming that the sweet murderous symphony of “the internet” screeching as it came to life was music to my ears. Back to the good old days of Geocities and later on, IRC Chat Channels, conversing with strangers over the internet is something I was always pretty comfortable with. Maybe it was because I was still mostly safely ensconced in LGBT chatrooms & message boards, but I cannot recall ever being confronted with deliberately antagonistic behaviour. Even in the real world, I honestly cannot think of a time where I was verbally attacked in any real way by a stranger for simply being me. And I’ve worked in Retail! Being thrown out of nightclub by a Drag Queen while she lobbed bottles of water at the back of my head sure, but I guess even she had good reason to… 😊 Maybe it’s just a reflection on growing old & fondly reminiscing about the “good old days” through rose coloured glasses? Whatever the reason, is it just me or are people just intentionally cruel these days?

What has got my tits in a tangle today is this: Yesterday I decided to pop another “General Audience” advertisement up on Facebook. For those of you not familiar with such painful undertakings, one of the many, many things you have to decide before submitting your ad for approval is who you want your audience to be. Now I mostly choose the safe option and advertise only to my current followers. Sometimes I will venture a little further and choose the option to show it to others who are friends of my current followers etc. Pretty safe stuff. No real objections to anything I put out there. Once or twice before, in an effort to grow my small business following on Facebook, I have elected to let Facebook “choose” who they think would appreciate my ads the most and who would be more likely to follow my page. Well, after the day I have had today, not even 24hrs after my advert was approved, NEVER AGAIN!

THE AD. FEELING TRIGGERED?

My morning coffee had not even reached my veins before I was having to fend off vicious, vile, and wholly unprovoked attacks. And that was just the start of it! My sweet little post which very simply advertised our latest range of blank greeting cards seemed to coax the most self-righteous & downright horrible homophobes out from under their rocks like flies to rotten meat. It was exhausting!!! And it was sadly nothing I had not read before on the comments page of any mainstream article that dared to mention anything remotely queer – these people just aren’t original or imaginative. It started with a simple “Fuck Off” – twice in a row in fact, from two different village idiots. At that stage I simply laughed and replied that if they had simply kept scrolling past the ad and not stopped to enthral us with such witty banter, we would have indeed “fucked off”. Their response? Another Fuck Off. *sigh* Took the fun right out of that one. But it only went downhill from there.

There were plenty of others. A lot of “Just think of the children!” and their latest trope, “Drag Queens are grooming children!”. And as much as I pointed out that none of that had anything to do with me selling blank greeting cards, it just kept coming.

The point I’m trying to make here is that it just really surprised me how many people, and yes, they were unfortunately Australian because I checked, felt that they were entitled to share their opinion. They felt compelled to comment on a Facebook advertisement & share their righteous, twisted view of the world. Now if I had posted something that was confrontational or provoking in any way then sure, I would be inviting such an abhorrent response, but it wasn’t. It was an advert. For greeting cards.

All I can think of is that they were quite literally triggered by the rainbow colours! That the moment the ad flashed up on their screens as they were idly scrolling through Facebook (do these people even have real jobs?) they just HAD to tell us how disgusting and wrong we all are! That we are sick and just out to get their children. I don’t even like children! One “educated” fool even blamed me for offending women by allowing trans women to compete in sport! And when I pointed out that it also had nothing to do with me selling blank greeting cards & that I wouldn’t be drawn into a debate on the topic because a. I honestly knew nothing about it and b. I had nothing to do with it and therefore felt unqualified to offer an opinion (yep, went right over his head, as expected…), I was told that I was being defensive? Talk about arguing with stupid people, being dragged down to their level, and then beaten by experience.

The whole day has just left me flat. It appears that the days of “If you have nothing positive to say, don’t say anything at all” or “live & let live” are well and truly gone. Everyone not only feels entitled to their opinion, but they also feel as though they have the right to “shove it down everyone’s throats”, to paraphrase one of the delightful comments I read today. And there is just no taking the high road with these people. You say that their opinion means diddly squat and that seems to just egg them on. It’s nasty and undignified and feels very un-Australian if you ask me. It does nothing but encourage the Us vs Them mentality. It’s like the Marriage Plebiscite all over again. It’s exhausting and I’m just over having to justify my very existence to strangers.

Anyone else feel the same?

Anyone want to buy a blank greeting card?

And yep...as I publish this story this morning, yet another Fuck Off. *sigh*