We need to address how eager we are to publicly comment on situations, and to condemn people and reports of their behaviors when we don’t have direct firsthand knowledge.
There’s no need to cater to the “why haven’t people commented on this” crowd when real people are involved, and when we don’t know exactly what people are dealing with.
No one needs to apologize for anyone else’s behavior, and no one *needs* to prove their own piety by condemning someone based on allegations. No one needs to be judged for not sharing an opinion on the behaviors of other people, anyway.
And if you find yourself celebrating the downfall or “comeuppance” of someone in the arts that you don’t know, and have had no interactions with, based solely on your perceptions of them from a distance, the best idea is to keep it to yourself.
A friend of mine put it well when he said, “Turning strangers into monsters so we can slay them online is a societal cancer that hurts everyone … How many people do you actually know well enough to condemn?”
And while it’s true that you can’t really assign blame when someone does something as drastic as take their own life when the world collapses on top of them and social media is fueling that collapse, we seem to have generated and perpetuated a system that easily contributes to pushing someone off that cliff when they’re already teetering on the edge.
B. Clay Moore 