Thank you for writing this.

Pity that we have become so hyper-sensationalized that we don’t stop and think.

Pity that we feel so entitled in our need of a ‘good story’, which today means in many cases protagonists surviving systemic abuse at the hands of mostly men, regardless of any level of veracity, that as my good friend Laurie Payne once wrote, “Men and women…two islands moving further and further apart.”

The irony of course is that only the ‘good story’ leads in the mainstream media. Abuse has become a ‘red badge of courage’ which sells, and so in order to increase profits, one must ‘exaggerate during the editing process.’

There is very little follow up…if there is, and glaring errors are found, it ends up looking like it does in the newspaper: a small print apology, tucked in the corner on page 30.

And such ‘fluff’ de-legitimizes the very real suffering of those who have been subjected to abuse.

William Stewart is doing the right thing. Perhaps others who wish to pad their victimhood resume will think twice before publishing.

Pity that our attention spans have become so limited that hardly any are willing to state the obvious: when does a protagonist become an antagonist?

And by not checking up on sources, by not asking hard questions of ‘victims’, and by not listening to the other, let alone legal, sides of the story, we become a culture of enablers with no need for accountability.

Have we become ‘accesories to the act’ in terms of libel and slander or even worse, have we become the 21st Century equivalent of a lynch mob, wherein all a victim has to do is signal a sin and the digital cry goes out, “Hang ’em high…but first, give me all the grisly details — real or imagined.”

And who wants to live on such an island, or read about or view its tribulations, wherein a human being’s gender only makes their attempts to clear themselves worthy of condemnations and hyper-generalizations?

I mourn the loss of respect this means.

All of which also means that most of us feel so entitled to judge others that we don’t have to listen, let alone think… and so we become the antagonists.

It’s like we’re all in some carnival of the damned wherein the Ringmaster intones, “Who cares about ‘the facts’ and the collateral damage…it’s on with the next story!”

Life therefore in this case is indeed a circus, and in terms of how we treat each other, we the patrons are the paying clowns.