Stupid is as Stupid Does, Evil is as Evil is, Tragedy is as Tragedy is and An Ass is nothing but an Ass

I know Shellie, not as well as others, but I have met her and have talked with her extensively…on twitter, on skype, on blogs…..I have remained silent about this publicly but last night as my husband and I sat and talked about it, he and I both came to the same conclusion.

I would have done the same thing she did. He would not have done that. Why? Because I use social media alot, he doesn’t.  We live in the middle of my family. If this had happened, I could have called anyone, they would have called my husband or I could have called him on his cell phone. And I could have talked to him the whole way home.

I could have screamed at him, I could have shook my fist at the heaven’s above and screeched "what in the world has happened here?" I would have had an entire yard full of family at my house within 2 or 3 minutes. One phone call and my entire family would have been standing by my side. And, I probably still would have sent out a mass message asking for prayers and strength.

Shellie did not have any of those options really. Her husband was away training to be deployed. You don’t just pick up the phone and call someone in the military on their cell phone and talk to them while they get home to you. And, if they are states away or in another country, do you really want to tell them that on the phone, wouldn’t you prefer that a chaplain or someone be with him. Indeed, even if you aren’t thinking clearly, the one thing you would think about is that you want someone with your spouse when they learn of the news.

And, so…why did Shellie not deserve to have someone with her?  She didn’t live in the middle of a mass of family members who would come rushing to her side. She did have a blogging community that immediately found other bloggers who lived near her and they quickly made arrangements to be with her if they could until her husband or other family could be there. But she had her other child there, she wasn’t alone was she?

When was the last time you dealt with a family tragedy with comfort from an eleven year old?

Never I suspect. As a matter of fact I would be willing to bet, he needed comforting of his own. I’m going to shut this down because I am so verbose and this subject is so horrible. I just want to say this, I broke my leg…while tweeting…I stepped off a curb because I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing. I fell and broke it. That was an accident, moreover, a pretty stupid one. People have had car accidents while texting and tweeting. They were accidents and moreover, they were probably pretty stupid ones. A family tragedy is NOT an accident. It is a family tragedy.

And, even though I live in the middle of the bulk of my family and one shout would bring the whole neighborhood calling……….I rarely talk to some of those people even on a weekly basis. But the people online that I chat with, tweet with, facebook with, skype with, many of them are people I talk to on a daily basis. Many of them multiple times a day.

I took a look at some of the issues that Ms McGraw seemed to have issue with and I honestly can’t believe ABC was silly enough to give her a space to make her inane comments. She took time from her day (which she could have spent with her children) and went through Shellie’s entire twitter feed and blog all the way back to June of 2009.

Hummmm, where were her kids?

I supplement our income with my online activities. And that includes twittering various giveaways and simply networking. Ms McGraw takes the time to count Shellie’s tweets, where were her kids then? And, just on a whim, I decided to look at the twitter stats that Ms. McGraw managed to toss into the mix. You know what, I have almost twice as many as Shellie. I have more than 5 times as many blogs and blog posts. Does that make me evil too? I guess not because I haven’t experienced a family tragedy and then looked to my friends for support

As I said, I’m trying to shut this down, but I am quite verbose and I’ve let this build up for days. I’m angry at evil, the evil of Ms. McGraw, the evil of ABC allowing her the opportunity to make an ass of herself and the evil that took a woman’s most precious gift of all, her child. And, I am concluding with this, a message to Ms. McGraw, my mother has cancer. I am an only child. I live in the middle of my family. When and it really is a matter of when, not if, my mother passes away, I will have more family around me than I know what to do with. I will have my husband too I’m sure. But, you can almost guarantee without a shadow of a doubt, I will let my online family (friends, community, twitter friends, skype friends, etc) know of the tragedy of death.

And, with that, yes, stupid is as stupid does, but a tragedy is just that, a tragedy. And, an ass is an ass, which one are you? 

Oh and emotion took me away on this and I didn’t proof it, so read between the lines and if you find a mistake, don’t be more of an ass, over look it.

See I told you, I should have never even got started.  I am going to say one more thing now and I may say 10 more later, but my final take on this for now is this…………….look at Ms. McGraw’s twitter feed, she has less tha 100 tweets and a majority of them are about this tragedy.  So, basically, my take on that is, she doesn’t get Twitter, she doesn’t understand it, and she doesn’t use it frequently. 

And, if you aren’t a user of Twitter (just like anything else people use), you don’t understand it, you don’t get the sense of community.  When you have less than 100 tweets since what appears to be maybe Monday of this week….you’ve been tweeting a might bit much yourself eh? 

If you don’ t use Facebook or Skype or Blog, changes are you simply do not understand social media and Lisa Neal Gualtieri (the person who was quoted as a Social Media Expert "Lisa Neal Gualtieri, an adjunct clinical professor of the health communication program at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and an expert in social media and public health") apparently doesn’t know as much as she has led her employer to believe or she too would "get" it. 

Why?  Want to hear another pathetic piece of information.  This is the time of day that I work.  Guess where my children are.  One is at school, the other is with my mom.  Why?  Because my mom watches him when she is able (she has cancer if you didn’t get that from the other comment) so that I can work.  And I, being thee of horrible evil, have taken time out of my work day to write this.  That means that at some point, my son is either going to be here with me alone, with his father or at my mom’s while I do the work I should be doing now.

So, I’m going to do that now, and leave the idiots to themselves.