If you chose not to vote, don’t complain on social media
By: Missy Arneson
Copy Editor
Election season: the time when everyone argues for months on end over which one of two terrible people are less terrible than the other.
Whether you voted for Trump, Clinton, or another candidate, I think we can all agree that nobody is really pleased with the choices we made Nov. 8.
Political campaigns are awful to watch no matter who they’re for, but the amount of toxicity this cycle was downright horrendous.
From the #hillaryforprison hashtag to Hillary’s comment about Trump’s supporters being a “basket of deplorables,” the whole season was full of hateful and uncalled for actions.
Not so polished but just as annoying are all the people on social media that flood everyone’s feeds with post after post about politics.
Taking a strong stance is fine, even good in politics, but no one wants to see Great Aunt Sally’s thirtieth post today about the evils of the government and how everything is a conspiracy.
So the summer before a big election such as our recent presidential election becomes a sort of ‘unfollow season’ — we change our account settings so we no longer see anything from people who continually post articles or opinions that we disagree with.
While it’s healthy to develop informed ideas by listening to dissenting opinions, it gets exhausting to constantly be told our ideas and beliefs are wrong, without any attempt at a conversation on how we can form better ideas.
Even though the election is over, our Facebook feeds will still be drowning in political posts for a while.
A lot of people are angry over the result of the election, and want to vent their feelings in a way that allows their opinions to be heard by many all at once.
Of course, these complaints are pretty pointless.
Those who voted are at least validated in their complaints — despite the fact that they can’t change anything, at least they tried to get the outcome they wanted.
But the whiners who didn’t vote and now have the gall to complain about the result are like the classmate who doesn’t participate in a group project, then complains about the group’s grade.
They can be upset all they want, but they obviously didn’t care enough to try and change the outcome.
Soon enough the political scene will die down, our feeds will return to cute animals and recipes we never intend to make, and we can start looking at our friends’ posts again.
Until then, maybe stay off social media for a while.
