The Mirage of Pain: How Social Media Discredits Social Issues

Domino's Pizza, 2-liter sodas, tossed salad, and a mix of Generation Xers and Millennials.  About 30 of us packed in a warmly lit room to just...talk.  The organizer asked for everyone to write down a topic on a torn piece of paper and toss it in the "bucket of discussion" for breakdown and evaluation.  Yep, you guessed it, police brutality was near the top of the pile.  Unlike the other topics that were approached with slight anxiety, this one was jumped on with force.  I wasn't at all surprised by the cliche-esque nature of the conversation...we were all African-American and mostly female (sorry...not sorry).  But I was a little frustrated by it.  I'd been seeing it all day on Facebook from these VH-1 groupies-turned-activists, and I was about filled up with the "my heart is so heavy" and "I have no words (right before a 17 sentence paragraph)" post.  So before a you guys can't be serious flew out of my mouth, I stopped the convo and asked how many people in the room had been brutalized (not harassed) by the police.  Out of 30 only myself and another young lady raised our hands.  The conversation turned into a lesson after that point.