The world is a scary place right now. And blame is being thrown around in all directions but we won't achieve anything playing the blame game. All we can do is our own little bit to make the world less scary.
And here's what we can do - when anything happens, and I do mean anything, that is news worthy at all, give it a few minutes before we post something on Facey b or Twitter. I mean jheez, if you're really strong give it an hour, or a few hours, or a day. I do it myself, I go on Twitter to find out about a news story - Twitter is NOT the place to go to when you want news.
Say there's a story about an elephant on the loose in India, you know the normal scary type of shit that happens in them foreign countries, people will start posting things instantly with the #IndiaElephant hashtag... the first message will be a picture of people running away, the second post will speculate there are actually 3 elephants, the third will say there's also a hippo, 7 dead, 12 dead, less than 100 dead, sorry no one dead but there's footprints in the butter.
And yeah, there'll always be someone, even as the people are still getting trampled by the elephant, that wants to make a joke. Oh those Jaipur people!! #India Elephant #LOLophant.
I say this as a comedian, stop trying to be 'funny'. Hardly anyone is good at being funny and even a professional comedian is gonna struggle to get a laugh out of a tragedy - shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up and let the tragedy unfold and die down before you even think of commenting on it, making it worse, fanning the flames of often racist speculation and certainly don't make a weak pun about the situation you unforgivable cunt. And you hear the defence all the time - 'it's fighting back against tragedy to have a laugh innit, we're aaavin a laarrf' - but that's the point mate, no one is laughing at your shitty pun, and if nobody laughs at your joke it's not actually a joke, so what is it?
At worst it's just a very offensive and insensitive comment with the elephant/hippo still on the loose and at best it's just a complete and utter waste of time. We can all do our own little bit to make the world a nicer place to be right now and that isn't it!
Your shitty comment makes things worse. Even that Facebook safe thing leaves a bad taste - social media is great sometimes but let's not pretend it's a lifesaver in any situation - to paraphrase Nancy Myers - we all are drowning and you're just describing the water.
So my advice is, next time an elephant goes on the rampage, go to sleep, dream about something good and wake up and assess the situation then. And when you find out it was actually Pakistan not India and it wasn't an elephant in reality it was a grey horse with a big nose you won't feel like such a prick trying to delete a tweet that has already been retweeted four times by your equally dumb mates.
We DO need to fight against evil and tragedy, but this isn't the way. As the Munich police posted on Twitter recently, 'To all who publish pictures of victims: STOP DOING THIS! Please show more respect!'.
And strangely, the fact that we live in a world where we need to be told this is perhaps the scariest thing of all.