If you didn’t see, there was a rather offensive 9/11 mattress sale advertisement from a San Antonio company that circled around YouTube last week. Yeah, it was pretty bad.
When I saw it, I had a similar “yeesh” reaction most people got when watching it. But then I got curious. I knew how the Internet liked to respond to things like this. So I hopped on Facebook and found the mattress company’s page. I looked at the comments.
There was the typical outrage below every single post for the last year. But there was more than that. There were threats. There were even people posting that lady’s address and suggesting bad things should happen to her. In a sense, it was its own form of cyber terrorism – spreading fear to the people involved in making the ad.
It’s ironic that in defense of September 11th victims – one of the marked moments where we decided to combat terrorism – people were creating their own form of terrorism.
I’ve seen this a lot lately. It’s a growing movement of vigilante terrorism that our country loves to engage in. When we don’t think the legal system goes far enough, we do our own things. We threaten. We were guns out of a convicted rapist’s house who got off with a lenient sentence. We post home addresses and suggest horrible things.
And it’s true, most of us aren’t the ones actually engaged in this vigilantism, but most of us at least like to cheer them on from behind our computer screens.
That shouldn’t be. Here’s why.
As victims of terror… we have to understand that we can’t combat terror with terror. It adds to the cycle.
As American citizens… we need to let the justice system do its job or else vote until the system is changed. It may be the slow way, but it’s the right way. Instance vengeance never goes well.
As believers in Christ… we have to understand that true justice comes from God. It’s not our responsibility to inflict justice upon the world. Vengeance is His. In fact, our job is to love mercy. Mercy is about people not getting what they deserve.
We can’t be the vigilantes in this world. We’re called to something greater. Let’s live up to that high calling.