What Happens When There Are Too Many Hashtags?

Ann Althouse had this post today, March 25, 2018, where she asks if one #movement is displacing another #movement?  For me it is an interesting question, and kind of speaks to the short attention span of modern society where everything is pushed by the media at hype-emotional levels demanding our attention right now.

The K-Y Jelly is hardly dry on the #metoo movement regarding the evils of powerful men and helpless women when all the sudden we have #marchforourlives demanding we fix the problems of kids being killed in school by a gunman using weapons that look like military guns (but really aren’t).  While we’re at it, I haven’t heard much from the #blacklivesmatter, or #bluelivesmatter groups for a while.  Have they come up with new hashtags to catch our attention?  If so, I’ve missed it.

Then, of course, we have the good old standby #movements, where people are routinely proclaiming their virtue and independence while part of a large group, for example, #notmypresident, #resist, #pussyhats, #berniebros, #I’mwithher, #Ihavevitue&youdon’t, #whatever.

The really cool thing about the hashtag movements is the #mobrule nature of them.  They start quietly, created by some small group or celebrity individual and then they seemingly grow overnight to be the essence of the #frenchrevolution, where the mobs would gather to watch as the nobility was paraded out to the guillotine to be executed.  Before too long they ran out of nobility and had to turn to the middle class as “counter-revolutionaries” just to keep the mobs quiet.

The thing about mob rule though is its disturbing tendency to get out of hand and begin to feed on its masters.  There is no thought of innocence, there is only guilt and the guilt must be avenged to appease the mob.  If, as in the French Revolution, you run out of guilty you really need to find new guilty or the mob is likely to turn on you.

For over two-hundred and thirty years we’ve thought ourselves a nation of laws, but was that true, or just an illusion to keep the mobs relatively small and easy to control?

Since at least the mid-1990’s the mass media has fed on our desire to organize as a mob and condemn the guilty bastard.  How many of us were outraged when OJ was not convicted of the murder the press had us convinced he had committed?  Yet somehow the California prosecutors could not convince a jury with the evidence they had.  Was that the point we began to dismiss this whole “we are a nation of laws” thing?

Thinking about the season we are in it is safe to assume our tendency for mob rule goes much, much, further back than the white Blazer.  Remember the story of Christ’s passion saw the Pharisees round up the mob to condemn Christ to his crucifixion when Pilot asked the crowd who should be released?  The mob cried out for Barabbas, a zealot, and criminal who had been convicted of murder.  The priests had a few plants stir up the crowd, and like our protests of today, most just go along with whoever yells the loudest.