Reading news recently has been somewhat of a trying experience, and I blame it all on the article comment sections. I feel like a character in a Cormac McCarthey novel, trudging my way through a trail of misinformed dreck, waiting for a family to take me in and tell me that the road has been wrong all along.
The comment section is a hierarchical tree of superuser badges and favorite commenter awards, all of which can be attained by scrawling such nonsensical junk as “Sarah Palin-in comparison, am I right?” Woah, make sure you sign that gem. Don’t want anyone to steal it. It can be comparable to a whitetrash caste system – the more furniture you have in your yard, the higher up you are. Having 12 couches on your porch will grant you the position of town Brahmin, much like having 12 super user badges will net you 13,000 followers on Huffington Post.
Now, before I quickly derail my intended purpose for writing this, I should get to what inspired this post. It is not to combat all comment section writers, I want to hone my scorn in on a select few. Listen up Baltimore Sun commenters, this PSA is for you:
Maryland’s gun control bill takes effect on Oct. 1.
There you have it. That’s October, the month that comes after September and before November. It’s the 10th month of the year. It rhymes with Shmoctober. Please quit inferring that the bill has taken effect every time you take to your Utz salted keyboard and type “How’s that gun control working out for ya?” on every single article that comes into your line of vision. It is a ridiculous question, and unless you are Professor X strolling through comment boards while your gifted mutants are in study hall, it is an unanswerable question.
This is a city that’s so eloquently nicknamed “Bodymore, Murdaland,” so you can imagine that city news outlets would provide acres of articles for such asinine comments to roam free. Normally I just sit and stomach them, but one finally broke me. It was an article about the fatal shooting of a 1 year old in the Cherry Hill neighborhood. Even the comment calling it the “gun grab” bill is incredibly wrong. A key tenant to the Maryland gun bill is that owners get to keep any gun owned or ordered prior to the Oct. 1 date.
What there is a severe lack of in comment sections is an understanding of what the writers are lobbying for. The least you can do is know when the law of your ire is set to kick in (In this case Oct. 1. Remember, rhymes with Schmoctober). After that date, feel free to say that it’s worthless, try and tie it to President Obama, or you can blame it on GNC being out of Gov. O'Malley’s favorite flavor of Muscle Milk. But until that date comes, you’re just a troll shouting into the wind.
