social media is the thing people still don’t know how to feel about

the other day ESPN, a channel sports fans like me have loved since its inception, suspended a

sports analyst

for tweeting her opinions about something happening in sports.

to be specific, she was tweeting about an ongoing NFL protest where a handful of players are kneeling during the National Anthem to bring attention to the fact that police are killing black people, many of whom are unarmed, and not paying a price for their crimes.

companies for eons have had the upper hand on the public voices of their employees but once blogging and now Twitter have risen up, the companies are panicked because OMG what happens if an employee tweets something controversial?

the double edged sword of social media is people are either posting things benign like pictures of puppies or babies, or extremely controversial items like their feelings about politics.

what these companies dont realize or want to agree to is that Control is an Illusion. and when you suspend an analyst for analyzing you look a bit hypocritical – especially when many public-facing personalities are being judged by how many twitter followers they have.

look no further than our president who was praised by the mavericky way he was able to reach out to his millions of followers on twitter and speak his mind.

so it’s a bit odd when the leader of the free world can tweet whatever he wants, but the people in the free world are punished for it.

that dynamic is what the original europeans who settled here were escaping from: royal tyranny

this country, stolen from the native americans, was built on the idea that one could express their feelings – particularly about issues of The State – without being punished.

for if the people cannot speak truth to power in America

the home of the brave

on any platform, from blogs to tweets,

then we have bigger issues than police murdering people in cold blood.

which is fucking crazy.