Fuck your ribbon

NOTE: I originally posted this to Facebook, where I figured it'd earn me a lot of apathy and maybe a couple of defriendings. Instead it was fairly well received (shocks me, I wrote it in a white heat with no editing. It should suck.)

Okay, these Facebook avatar-based movements are starting to piss me off.

Hey, go ahead and support something, that's cool guys. But what's aggravating is that the sum total of what you're doing is nothing. Yes, I see your green squares and your pink equal signs and I'm pretty much there. Other people see them and they're way over there, but what you've provided is the opportunity for the both of us to just nod or shake our heads and get on with our lives. Basically: Volume minus Message equals Bullshit.

Put another way, for every pro-Prop 8 or whatever ad that's out there, there's real damage done to the collective psyche. For every pink and red avatar, the healing is nil. You are not helping, you are making yourself (and your friends) feel better about yourself.

Now writing and communicating is scary as hell. I HATE putting this shit out for even limited public consumption because I have friends who disagree with me and at the end of the day, I just want to be kind of likable. Well, what I can tell you from recent adventures in my trade is that the concept of rejection is two metric shitloads scarier than actual rejection and that at the end of the day, people can be petty and bullheaded and mean but they are accepting that you will dissent with them in certain ways.

Writing is a holy chore, and needs to spread like a virus. Communication is a tool that's atrophied down to a collection of call and response on these issues because frankly the people benefiting from rhetoric want it that way. You need to get out there, practice your craft, and when people hit you with something that's difficult to deal with you go back to your hole, you study everything relevant, and you come back stronger than ever. You evolve. You understand how these people developed in such a vacuum of basic decency toward human rights and you will, slowly and maybe only incrementally, bring them toward the enlightenment that you only just previously sought out.

But your avatar is useless.