August 26, 2022
Dear Friends,
Who doesn’t love irony? I admit that is a very open-ended question with no real answer. Let me tell you why I asked this question. By now, I am sure that you know I appreciate a good meme. They bring great joy. They also are something I like to share with my friends to make them smile. The other day, I stumbled upon a meme depicting 4 pictures appropriately labeled. You see a mouse trap and it is labeled mouse trap. You see a bear trap and it is labeled bear trap. You see a lobster trap and it is labeled lobster trap. Finally, you see an image of the Facebook icon and TikTok icon and it is labeled as a human trap.
I found that meme ironic because I find most of my memes on Facebook. It can also be a teaching moment for all of us. Back in the day, I remember when I had to walk to and from school uphill both ways in a snowstorm how the internet was viewed. Any paper you had to write for school required information from a valid source (a journal, newspaper, encyclopedia, topic specific book from the local library, etc.). We were not to trust the internet. There was no proof that anything out on the worldwide web was true. Heaven forbid you trust Wikipedia or try to source it on a paper. There was a hesitancy to trust the information. Even now, I am wary of information that is not from a trusted source.
I say this because if we go to the human trap over the past few years, we see people diving down the rabbit hole of social media blindly trusting things that have no valid source material. The amount of memes people share about things that are obviously false, scares the bejeezus out of me. The amount of time and energy people spend arguing online, sharing things online, etc., shows how much of a trap these things have become. If you look at the other human trap, I can spend hours watching cat videos on TikTok. I have no plans that anything I ever share on a
platform like that will make me famous, but that is the hope of so many people. I want to become an influencer or more scarily when someone has basic success, they adopt that moniker and try to use it for their own personal gain. I am not anti-influencer. I just think some of them have paint the image that it is something easy to do and everyone wants easy money, not realizing how much work these people actually became famous.
If we use them properly, there are benefits to both traps. Cat videos are awesome, but sometimes I spend too much time watching them and never go to sleep. Memes make people laugh, but if I spend too much time on Facebook it is not good for my mental health. Information is great, but it needs to come from a trusted source, not some random website or link that has no real proof to back-up their claims. The idea that we have information at our fingertips is great. The consequences of the information also need to be considered.
This letter was not supposed to sound like I was wandering around in my bathrobe yelling get off my lawn. Sometimes this is what happens. I love to people watch - both the normal definition of people watch, but the online version as well. Some of the things I witness are downright hostile and angry, often coming from people who claim to be people of faith. Sure, we all have bad days. We cannot become so focused on the online traps that we forget what it actually means to follow Christ, to love our neighbor, even if we don’t always agree with them. It’s funny, I have friends who are Catholic and Atheist. I have friends who are Republican and Democrat. We engage in healthy conversations. We may not always agree but we still manage to treat each other as human beings. Beware the traps of the online world. They lead us to forget what God has called us to do.
God Bless,
Fr. Brian
P.S. What do you call a bear trapped in the rain? A drizzly bear.