Myisha Nawar

With society having tired of its foray into the world of whether men with penises ought to pee next to little girls, we have ventured onto our next symptom of total insanity: a deep rumbling of rage over the shooting of a 17 year old gorilla that could have killed a three year old child. The zoo killing set the internet on fire and triggered it into a blame game. What’s more is that most celebrities joined in on the backlash.
Over the weekend, a mother took her child to the Cincinnati Zoo. She turned her back on the kid for a minute; the kid promptly joined down into the gorilla enclosure housing Harambe, a 450-lb Western Lowland Silverback gorilla. The apoplexy prompted was ridiculous, to say the very least!
Social media routined out its obsession over hashtags and brought forth #JusticeForHarambe. OMG A NEW TREND! *sighs*. People are pretending as though the authorities have done something deeply wrong in defending a small child from the tender mercies of a giant gorilla. A makeshift vigil came to action outside the zoo in Cincinnati. SERIOUSLY?! Thirty times more stories were written about Harambe than 250 people injured in an airstrike near a hospital in Syria, let alone the millions of people killed each year in the US alone! Blame the zoo was the most common response. Piers Morgan, whose IQ is slightly lower than that of Harambe, tweeted “RIP Harambe. A magnificent gorilla dies because a zoo failed to make its barriers safe.” But as the zoo pin points, erecting barriers u to specifications is about all you can do and still allow people to see the animals. And guess what? The barriers around Harambe exceted any required protocol.
Perhaps the most idiotic response that has been circulating around is that they shouldn’t have shot the gorilla at all. This actually comes from two origins. The first, from environmentalists who hate humans and hence think this gorilla was more important than the three year old (UMM EVIL) and the second, from media members who have unilaterally declared that the gorilla was trying to protect the kid (D-U-M-B). Headline after headline screamed that Harambe was actually trying to hold hands with or protect the child. Yeah, no. HARAMBE WAS CAPABLE OF CRUSHING A COCONUT WITH HIS BARE HANDS! As Jack Hanna said, “I agree 1000 percent they made the right decision. A human being is alive today because of the decision the Cincinnati Zoo made.”
I have come across a lot of tweets raging over claims that they should have tranquilized the Gorilla. Now that everything is over and the child is safe, it’s as easy like the morning after a cricket match you see the highlights of and say ‘Wowowow don’t we need to do this differently?’. The people saying this don’t understand primate biology and silverback gorillas and the danger the child was in. Please go consult Mr. Google, thank you very much. By the way, tranquilizing the gorilla would not have been instantaneous. It would just have ticked off an already volatile gorilla WHILE it was next to a little child.
Hold up. Let’s talk about where the real venom was directed. IT WAS DIRECTED AT THE MOTHER! Twitter did what twitter does: it weaponized the ugliness. Among all the posts flying around, the most telling and un-self-aware, however, came from a man under the name Daddie: ‘Give me 10 children and I can guarantee that none of them will end up in a gorilla enclosure.’ But no, Daddie, here’s the thing: you CANNOT guarantee that. Children don’t play by the rules. They are like electrons in a nuclear family: kinetic and frenetic. Eyeing a single child is a process of reflexes and constant vigilance, but handling several of them-as Greg was doing at the precise moment her son slipped away-is definitely exponentially harder. So, stop mommy shaming over the whole incident. There isn’t a parent of a toddler alive who hasn’t had an “Oh my God, where’s my kid?” moment.
There is one more reaction springing up. It’s racist to kill the gorilla. Yes, believe it or not, a small cadre of social media users blamed the killing of the gorilla on racism. But, hey, one problem: THE CHILD IN QUESTION IS BLACK!
In conclusion, this story is much ado about nothing. But, in a society where an ape matters more than a human being, only some lives matter. *sighs*