hearts

I know you have heard of cyberbullying, but have you ever heard of R.I.P. Trolls? I have never even heard of that until today. Apparently there are people out there with hearts as cold as ice and as small as a grain of sand, no, even smaller than that, so they troll R.I.P. memorial pages and say something nasty to the deceased person. As if things weren’t bad enough for them while they were alive, they are still being bullied after death.

I have three examples. Naturally I had to pixelize all of the names and their images, not just to protect the innocent victims, but also to protect the bully. Yes you heard me right, I wouldn’t want the bully to come after me for posting their name and then turn around and call me the bully for showing their name despite the fact that they are the bullies.

This “Stay at home dad” decided it would be funny to share a page called Zombie… (the person’s name has been in the news and her mother was not convicted of murder, you know who I mean) with an abortion survivor’s timeline. Who would create a page calling someone a zombie after they were allegedly murdered by their mother who got acquitted? What kind of person does such a thing? Well, I went to click on that page to report it and it was already gone, so one down…

This was posted on a justice page for a child who was recently murdered while wearing a hoodie in Florida. The message is “Taste the rainbow, (name omitted) I wonder what flavor of hollowpoints got dug out of his chest!” What sick bastard would post this? I reported that person for posting that image on that R.I.P. memorial page. Take a look at some of the comments. The first one says “that’s not funny bitch” and she replied, but the comment is gone now so apparently she thought twice about what she was saying and removed it, who knows. The second person asked if this was supposed to be funny and the third person laughed. What is this world coming to when people laugh at a picture like this?

This person was just downright disrespectful to many R.I.P. pages. What kind of person does this?

I love computers and I love the internet, but when people sit in their house with total anonymity and post hateful things like this, there has to be some recourse. You can’t just think that it’s OK to be an asshole and nothing will happen. You can’t go up to a person and start calling them names without being slapped or punched in the face, so why would you go on the internet and type hurtful comments on their Facebook wall, especially after they died? You wouldn’t like it if you died and someone typed “LOL u died” on your memorial page would you? Think about other people’s feelings, put yourself in their shoes before you post negative comments like that, because someday that might be your R.I.P. page.

If you want to see who is posting these hateful things, join the Facebook page “United Against RIP Trolls and Cyberbullies.” Click LIKE and scroll through their page and start reporting the bullies because that is the only way we are going to rid Facebook of all the hate. When Facebook see’s that people are reporting them, their accounts will suddenly disappear. Perhaps one day cyber bullies will be held accountable for their actions.

Check this article out. It was written/posted on April 3rd 2012. Anti-bully law could turn trolls into criminals. I don’t believe in censorship because we all have a first amendment right to free speech, even if it’s hate speech, but where do we put our foot down and say that there is a huge difference between the two? There needs to be a discussion about where we draw the line with hate speech because I just can’t see why the law would protect people who want to insult other people for shits and giggles.

This story is not in the book, but I wanted to include it because this kitten was a part of our lives and touched our hearts.

Chip woke up and opened the front door to get his newspaper and he noticed that there was a box in the middle of the street that cars were having to swerve to avoid. He didn’t want the box to cause an accident so he picked it up to break it down and throw in the trash. When he looked inside the box, he saw the most terrible thing, someone had put a little kitten in the box and put it in the street. The kitten looked like it was 4 weeks old, it was a tiny thing and it had no business being in a box in the middle of the street, but apparently it had no choice because someone had put it there on purpose.

Chip brought the box inside the house and woke me up. We had our own cat at the time named Shanaynay who didn’t like other animals because she wanted all the attention to herself. He told me what happened with the kitten in the box and said that he didn’t understand why anyone would do such a horrible twisted thing to an animal.

We went to the store and bought some baby kitten food and a new litter box and a food dish and took care of her. We didn’t know what to name her so we just named her Baby since she was one.

She was a little neurotic even at that young age so I left her alone and let her decide when she wanted to be held. Every night I put her in a bed which I made up for her by my closet door which was also near her food and litter box. I had to sleep with my bedroom door closed so Shanaynay wouldn’t sneak in the room in the middle of the night and kill her.

We had her for a couple of weeks and one morning when I woke up she was sound asleep under my chin. We had just moved in this house and I didn’t have my bed on my grandmothers bed frame yet so she was able to climb the side of the mattress with her sharp claws. I was sleeping on my stomach and she had climbed up on my bed and snuck in there to keep herself warm. That let me know she was comfortable with me.

She started growing up and was big enough that I felt that Shanaynay would get along with her if we put them together. It took her awhile to be comfortable with Baby, but we stopped closing my door and gave her free reign of the house. Shanaynay still growled at her, but she wasn’t smacking or clawing at her. It was a fine line but I thought she was getting comfortable with Baby that they would eventually become best friends.

Chip played with her a lot. He would run through the house and she would chase him all the time. One day he was playing with her and she was running by herself in the kitchen and she ran into the back door head first. Chip picked her up and noticed that her eyes were spinning. I was in bed sleeping and he woke me up to come look at her. I didn’t know what either of us could have done and I was still half asleep when he showed her to me so I went back to sleep. In the morning he was crying and he had stayed up with her all night long. We took her to the vet which is a 2 minute walk from our house and they told us that she had major neurological damage and that it would probably cost thousands of dollars in medical bills and there was no guarantee that they could save her. Our only option was to have her put to sleep humanely.

They gave us a few minutes to think it over. We both sat in the room bawling our eyes out because Chip had saved her six months prior from being murdered by a car in the street. Somehow we were meant to save her, yet death was still going to take her from the world. She got a six month extension, but it seemed as though her time on this plane was over. We couldn’t afford to pay that kind of money to save a kittens life when we didn’t know if it would make a difference, so we let them take her from us.

That was one of the saddest days in our lives, but we knew that we did the right thing by her. We gave her a reason to trust people who may have abused her in the beginning of her life and it gave her more time than she was originally supposed to get. We will never forget Baby.

Here are some pictures of her: