It seems that with every passing day our sensitivity levels just keeps decreasing to the point where almost anything can be a trigger for us to lose our marbles.
The latest YouTube shooting is something that only further cements my belief that this generation has gotten sensitive and intolerant beyond a limit where they are ready to blame and fight over anything that slights them in any small way.
For a long time, I always felt that this was a strong suit of my generation that is ready to call out the wrongs of our society and make the other face their actions and words without any fear.
However, now it has reached a level where people are being overly paranoid, pedantic, impractical trying to think there is a hidden agenda behind everything and moral police people at every turn. And it is not limited just to India or America, instead, it is becoming an universal phenomena.
The YouTube Shooting
On Tuesday, YouTube star Nasim Aghdam as reported by the police, open fired at the California headquarters of YouTube wounding 3 people, with it ending in her suicide.
Allegedly, the woman in her late 30s was angry with YouTube policies and accused them of lowering her views and filtering people away from her channel.
Nasim would cover issues like animal rights, fitness, Persian culture and vegan diet on her channel and website called NasimeSabz.com and had previously in a video posted on her channel in 2017 objected to how YouTube was affecting her views and that her content was being “discriminated and filtered” without good reason along with censoring her videos, affecting her ad revenue and more.
Her anger continued to rise when, as told by her father to various news sites, YouTube stopped paying her for her video content and that “now she has no income”.
Her family had apparently reported her as missing and as per reports, police had even found her in Mountain View that is close to the YouTube HQ the night before, where they questioned her but let her go eventually.
Now, there is nothing wrong with having anger over a platform especially if it affects your income in some way, but that is in no way reason enough to go brandishing a gun and shooting innocent people.
She could have created a protest page or used her adequate online following to rally against YouTube, anything that did not involve guns.
And even after all this, US still won’t focus on stricter gun control. That is such smart thinking I swear.
Read More: Why Do Indians Have To Take Everything So Seriously?
Don’t Make Jokes On DJs
Closer to home, stand-up comedian Rahul Subramanian’s act was cancelled at the Pune Comedy Festival after he got dangerous threats from various DJs. Subramanian has often been featured in various AIB videos after winning the 2015 ‘YouTube Comedy Hunt’ with Kumar Varun for their channel ‘Random Chikibum’.
Yes, a few DJs took offence when Subramanian joked about the profession and DJs in general, in a small clip from his show ‘Kal Main Udega’. First, they vented their anger on social media and when that was not enough, they not only threatend actual physical harm but even turned up at one of his events in Gurgaon.
In a social media post, Subramanian has commented on this incident by saying, “I was performing in Gurgaon and I was informed that there were some people waiting for me outside the venue, one of them a guy who had apparently threatened to beat me up if he ever met me.”
So… pic.twitter.com/GuO2tjvVt5
— Rahul Subramanian (@RahulSubramanic) March 28, 2018
Now both these incidents greatly highlight how not only are we becoming overly touchy but also willing to take extreme action to avenge our hurt sentiments.
From threatening a person to actually doing a mass shooting, there is little stopping the current generation from taking severe action to retaliate against any slight done to them.
And that is extremely troubling, since where does it end then? Tomorrow it might reach a stage where a person could very well shoot me dead for wearing a shirt whose colour they don’t like. Or eating from a spoon instead of a fork.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: CNN, The Telegraph, The Indian Express + more
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