Monday, December 15, 2014

The Danger of Conspiracy Theories




I know that this is kind of extremely random – especially because I haven’t been able to write anything for a while but here goes. Over the weekend I had to take some down time to try and fight off a cold. I found myself on Facebook scrolling through random things because honestly Facebook is great when you feel like you have to do something besides just lie there but can’t really do much more.

In my scrolling I came across many tributes and articles about the Sandy Hook shooting that took place in Newtown, Connecticut two years ago. Although I don’t spend large amounts of time dwelling on it or researching it, it has been a hard story for me. It just hits too close to home. First of all, it’s only a few hours from where we live. Second I had just given birth to Bear a few days before it happened so my maternal instincts were a little on overload when I got the news and like 9/11 I will always remember that moment. Third because I had two children off at school that day – I had kissed them goodbye and sent them off on the bus, trusting in the simple fact that I’d see them that afternoon. Tiger was the same age as many of those children who lost their lives. I wept for the parents who had done the same thing I had that Friday but had their world shattered. Lastly because I’ve been where those Sandy Hook families have been. I’m pretty sure it was even a Friday when my middle-school went on lockdown because a student shot and killed another student. It shattered our innocence forever and that was when I was 12 and there was only one victim.

As I read through the comment sections of the Sandy Hook articles I knew I had to say something. For anyone who is blissfully unaware there are many people now who are completely convinced that Sandy Hook never happened and is completely a government run hoax. Those people are troll-like trying to take over the comment sections of articles related to what happened and prove their superior intelligence – convinced that the rest of us are mindless fools. Sometime after the first anniversary I read an article full of what it described as “proof” – it was full of the most ridiculous non-sense I could have imagined. The parents were called actors because they didn’t “look like” they could have been in a relationship with one another and they “weren’t grieving enough”. They dared to complain that we haven’t seen the pictures of the bodies on tv or had more film footage. These people never pause to consider that maybe the media for once is respecting the fact that this is tragic enough to where they should back off and respect those who died instead of showing gruesome footage (that no one sane really wants to see and for that matter these same people probably wouldn’t accept as authentic) and focusing only on the most distraught people as they interview (which I can verify from personal experience that they do). The idea of the conspiracy theorists was that it was all just a farce to strengthen evidence against gun laws or even homeschooling.

There’s another similar story I heard recently about Malaysian Airlines flight 117 – people who believed that it was another tragedy that never happened. The idea was that the plane was actually the Malaysian Airlines flight 370 that had earlier crashed into the Indian Ocean. This is another one that struck close to home as we have good friends who had just visited with a longtime friend that was going home on that plane. Their grief is real. They lost a good friend who only a short time before they had laughed with as he played with their little children.  

The idea behind conspiracy theories can be interesting. It feeds off of the concept that we know is true – there is always more to a story than meets the eye. They are especially tempting if we can believe that we know more about what really happened than the person next to us and can either engage that person’s belief or start a good debate. I’m not going to say that we shouldn’t question the reasoning behind tragic events and want to find out the whats and the whys and get our information straight so we can find ways to prevent further suffering. What I am saying is that at the very least we can be decent enough to the people that are mourning to admit that they happened. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to have strangers asking for the pictures of my child or grandchild's tortured corpse so that they can prove that she actually existed. Those who do are no better than the people trying to convince us that the Holocaust never happened and deny us the chance to search for real answers.

And for all of you people still desperately searching for a conspiracy - how about this one – how about a group that goes around coming up with random judgments and outright lies that make us stop believing that these horrible things really are happening. That to me seems the most potentially harmful and frightening one of all.