Thursday, April 2, 2015

Sorry, But This "Mean Tweets" Episode Isn't Funny Like The Others. But It's Important

A couple of the homeless people after
 reading mean tweets about the homeless
for a PSA to encourage looking looking at all
people as part of humanity.  
I'm a big fan of Jimmy Kimmel's "Mean Tweets" segments, in which  celebrities read the horrible things people say about them on Twitter.

The celebrities have a good sense of humor about it, and it's pretty funny. I've featured a few of them on this here blog thingy.

I don't mean to be Debbie Downer here, but there's another "Mean Tweets" episode circulating, and Jimmy Kimmel and his humor were not involved.

The organization, Raising The Roof Canada,  has homeless people read mean Tweets about themselves.

It turns out, Surprise! lots of idiots on Twitter say idiotic, mean things. Among the awful things they say are insults about homeless people, how they are supposedly subhuman, not something we shold see, and it's all their fault, blah, blah, blah.

The Canadian broadcaster CBC has the deets:

"The goal? To get people to see that these people who have nowhere to live are human beings, too.

'Only when this happens will people stop saying nasty things, stop assuming the stereotypes are true,' said Carolann Barr, executive director of Raisiing the Roof. 'Then we can work together to prevent and end homelessness.

Barr and Raising the Roof wanted to create a campaign that would help people look past stereotypes about homelessness and see the real folks who live their lives without a place to cal home."

I'm sure the heartbreaking PSA you'll see in the video below won't change the behavior of the Twitter twits who make sport of skewing homeless people. (And in the process making themselves far less dignified than said homeless people.)

Homelessness is often a product of bad luck. Sometimes it's a product of a bad decision, but we're all guilty of bad decisions. Usually we recover quickly, but occasionally, the recovery is hard to come by.

Maybe the mean Twitterers should become homeless for awhile. Just to see what it's like.  I'd also like to see the idiot people who Tweeted such nonsense to say it face to face to the people featured in the video.

How would they react to the fact they made some of these people cry, and many of us viewers cry?

I'd like to think there's some humanity hidden somewhere inside the mean Tweeters, but I have mh doubts.

For the rest of us, the video you'll see below is a useful reminder that everybody, including the homeless, are humans with hopes and feelings and worthiness.

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