By Michael Gold
Recent stories in the media are making me question our ability to respect the rights of other people. A meanness has crept into American life, especially on social media.
Witness the seven men at a Cornell fraternity who allegedly raped a woman impaired by heavy alcohol and drug use at the school two years ago, a story that just came to light, because the woman recently brought a lawsuit against them.
How are some other men responding on social media? They’re trying to identify the victim, to embarrass, harass and punish her online.
We do not have to excuse this woman for drinking to excess, then combining that with ketamine, which can cause hallucinations. But her poor judgment cannot not justify the predatory behavior of the fraternity boys who took advantage of an intoxicated woman.
A social media mob, as The New York Times calls it, is working feverishly to get Jane Doe’s name out on the Internet.
Why are they doing this? These social media thugs think the alleged rapists are the real victims. I don’t see how that’s possible, but the men engaged in this disgusting effort to uncover Jane Doe’s identity feel that the victim brought on the assaults herself. One of the leaders of this effort is a 23-year old man who has posted on social media asking Adolf Hitler for help to rid America of immigrants of color, as if Hitler were some kind of god.
In another sordid story, two men were charged in mid-October for allegedly supplying two Fashion Institute of Technology students in Manhattan with fentanyl last March. One of them, Moses Freire, allegedly raped one of the students, who died. Freire took photos of the two women he poisoned, then texted the photos to his friends.
On October 15th, a 16-year old boy killed three special needs children and a teacher at a school in Oregon. A fourth child and a second teacher were injured. The shooter had been a special needs student at that very school. The shooter’s mother had purchased the shotgun for her son’s birthday. The son, Griffin John II, killed four people and wounded two in three minutes.
How could this mother have not figured out that buying a shotgun for her emotionally troubled son was a really bad idea?
It seems we can’t solve our problems. We can’t even admit that we have problems.
How is it possible that we don’t recognize school shootings as a national emergency? We’re talking about the safety of our children.
The country has suffered 27 school shooting incidents with 17 people killed and 29 in the last year alone, according to Education Week, a nonpartisan news publication covering K-12.
We actually have a school shooting database now, to track every incident.
At the very least, we desperately need legislation that requires every potential gun owner to get training in basic safety measures before completing a purchase. The training should include watching videos of what a bullet does to the human body.
If Griffin John’s mother had been legally mandated to take a gun safety and education course, which included a discussion of how to be a responsible gun owner, she might never have purchased this weapon for her child.
Every would-be gun buyer should be taught this basic principle from Spider Man – with great power comes great responsibility. You want to own a gun? Understand that the power it gives you means you potentially hold the lives of others in your hands.
The gun industry is so powerful it can toss politicians up in the air as easily as softballs, but it’s far past time for our elected leaders to show some spine and rebel. It’s their job to protect us, not cave to a lobby that is solely interested in profit to the exclusion of all other considerations, like our lives. Yes, Americans love their guns, but we need to build some kind of protections into the system for everyone else.
I was an elementary school teacher in New York City for 18 years. We practiced shelter drills on a regular basis. When the principal called out over the loudspeaker the code words, it was my job to immediately lock the door, then herd the children into a corner of the classroom in such a way that none of us could be seen from the window in the door. You try tightly bunching up 25 or more kids into a corner, so they’re out of sight. School administrators would then walk by every door to make sure that not even one child could be seen.
A few of the kids giggled, but notably, most of them did not. I think they sensed that this was a very serious business, that their little lives depended on them being able to hide well from a stranger who meant to harm them.
It’s not just the terrible hole in our gun safety laws, where we have this inability to see an appreciation for the lives and integrity of other human lives, but in a host of other areas. There’s a general pattern of blindness afoot, about how our actions can affect others.
Take a look at Elizabeth Holmes, former CEO of Theranos, for instance. No, she didn’t kill anybody, but she could have come close. Her blood testing kit caused a great deal of unnecessary distress.
Theranos was started in 2003. Holmes thought she could take a shortcut to glory, wealth and fame by fooling investors about the capability of her blood test product.
A documentary film came about Holmes came out in mid-October. She claimed that with just one little drop of blood pricked from your finger, her company’s product could figure out the amount of cholesterol and iron in your blood, as well as learn other genetic information about you, or whether you had some kind of disease, such as cancer or diabetes, instead of having a medical technician stick a needle in your arm.
Theranos attracted a number of famous and wealthy investors, including Rupert Murdoch, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, and George M. Schultz, a former secretary of state under President Reagan. The company sold 1.5 million blood tests for about 175,000 consumers in Arizona. Holmes became a billionaire.
It was a lie. The blood testing product didn’t work. The results were often inaccurate. A number of patients who got the test results underwent medical procedures that were either unnecessary or damaging to their health. Some people were falsely told they had cancer and were traumatized.
Holmes was prosecuted for investor fraud and found guilty in 2022. She’s now serving time in a minimum security prison in Texas. She’s currently seeking to have her sentence commuted by President Trump.
Jack Nicholson’s character in the movie, A Few Good Men, shouted, “You can’t handle the truth!’ How is it that Americans have become so hardened to events that we can’t look inside ourselves and think about the consequences of what we do, to ourselves and the people around us?
We have become resistant to learning. Americans are reading less, so we’re learning less. Also, critically, we’re not paying attention to objective media sources.
“Overall, about half of U.S. adults (53%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media,” stated a 2025 Pew Research Center study. Facebook and YouTube are the leading social media sites for news consumption.
“Facebook and YouTube outpace all other social media sites as places where Americans regularly get news: 38 percent of U.S. adults say they regularly get news on Facebook, and 35 percent say the same about YouTube,” the study said.
“Smaller shares of Americans regularly get news on Instagram (20 percent), TikTok (20 percent) or X, formerly known as Twitter (12 percent),” the Pew study stated.
Social media is quite possibly the worst place to get news. Our social media feeds inflame and incite hatred of others. The algorithm just keeps putting out twisted bits of rage-inducing posts, urging us to despise the people who don’t agree with us.
Computer nerds used to have a saying – garbage in, garbage out. If you program the computer badly, it’s going to give you bad data.
That’s what’s going on today. We’re paying attention to the least objective media available, with a bias that intensifies over time, because of an algorithm that feeds us trash meant to get us angry and blast other people on the Internet.
We need to start teaching ethics classes in high schools. Included in all discussions should be several lessons on how to behave ethically on social media. Jesus said it best: ” Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
This might help sensitize kids in a nation that’s forgetting how to feel.
The lyrics to the song “Amazing Grace” goes, “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.”
We’re currently in the lost and blind phase.
Michael Gold is a columnist for The Yonkers Times. His work has been published in The New York Daily News, The Albany Times-Union, the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, The Hartford Courant and other newspapers.