Member-only story
Imagine an Internet Free of Rage Bait
Aren’t you tired of being angry all the time?
A woman swans about her house, fixing cereal from scratch because her child woke with a craving for corn flakes. A throat tickle propels her to break out the cough drop molds. She dons ball gowns. Her hair is coifed. Her voice is soothing, melodic, lulling us into a zombified state. Men film videos depicting all the vile things they’d do to their girlfriends while they sleep. A mother of thirteen stockpiles her children’s individual refrigerators with enough candy to juice up a kindergarten class while another mother feeds her two-year-old with a stack of half-cooked pancakes drenched in syrup. A teenager laments over a messy room and her housekeeper’s inability to clean it. She can clean it with her other arm — the teenager snarls into the camera — the arm that isn’t broken.
Then the invariable swarm.
The legions come to the comments with their verbal hatchets and saws. Speaking in exclamation points, they are emphatic in their entreaties. Primed to pillage. The illiterate, entitled youth. The women intent on reverting back to a time when they couldn’t vote or hold property or credit cards in their name. The mothers killing their children with sugar, with neglect.
