It’s been nearly a week since the Isla Vista Massacre where a crazy person took the lives of 6 people and himself and wounded 13 others. Yes, I said crazy person, if you go around stabbing and killing people then I think it’s a pretty safe bet to simply label that individual as a crazy person. There’s no need to mention his name or bring further attention to the individual. What we can understand is that his motives seem to be purely driven by his hatred for women. Even though most of his victims were male there is no doubt from the videos he put out prior to the massacre that his motivation was his hatred toward women. End of discussion.

I’m often amazed to watch how the media reacts after things like this happen. Surprisingly, I’ve seen very little of the media trying to blame this on violent video games. That makes me happy, maybe we can finally get rid of the video game bogeyman and stop blaming violence in the media since there is zero evidence that violence in the media causes people to act out in this manner. Like Chris Rock once said, “Whatever happened to crazy?”

The one thing I’ve found interesting is how the twitter-verse has reacted. I’ve only recently started getting into twitter on a regular basis and paying attention to the trending topics. First we saw #YesAllWomen trend where many women shared their experiences of abuse or discrimination. Men, feeling left out I guess, then brought about the #YesAllPeople trend. I didn’t have a problem with either of these, though some of the tweets in the #YesAllPeople side seemed very dismissive of the female experience. But in the past 24 hours we’ve seen “LiesToldByFemales and #LiesToldByMales spring up. It’s almost like there’s a gender twitter war going on and that it’s starting to spill over into other online forums.

We need to respect eachother and teach our kids to respect eachother and respect themselves. That being said I hope we don’t lose our sense of humor in all this. Take the time to mourn those we’ve lost, take a moment to think about how men and women are treated in the world today. Let’s appreciate eachother and laugh at and with eachother, because we are different and if we forget how to laugh the world will become an even more dark and miserable place then it already is.