Is our anger ever righteous?

I remember, in an earlier phase of the internet, the sense of being part of a large, ongoing conversation. On Facebook and Twitter, one could be drawn (for better or for worse) into dialogue with all kinds of perceptive people one had never met in real life. Social media these days feels very different.

Between the whims of the algorithm, which seem never to promote the things I want to read or the things I write, and the sheer quantity of trolls, bots and malign presences drenching these platforms with tedium, one feels caught up in a crowd of people shouting at each other, never really feeling heard.

Angry

With that said, however, I recently posted on X about a shocking case in the news: a couple of men who had adopted, abused and murdered a little baby, and had done so without social workers or medical personnel intervening in ways that would have saved a little life. For some reason, that was the kind of contribution the algorithm was happy to promote, with thousands of people seeing it, and many more engaging with it.