Her name is Megan Crosby, and she plays softball in Texas. If you look on YouTube and other social media outlets, she recently surpassed Hitler, Saddam, Pol Pot, Caligula, and Usama bin Laden as the worst person who has ever lived.
I’m working with my iPad and not sure how to embed the video. If you haven’t already seen it, just google Megan Crosby or go to YouTube and look for “Ejected or Not? 6/6/15” and the video will come up.
Megan is a junior catcher for the Needsville High School softball team, which was in the championship game of the state tournament in Texas. Twice, she gave the bionic elbow (in honor of the late Dusty Rhodes) to girls from the other team as they were scoring runs, though there was no play at the plate.
It was not right. She made two dirty plays. I’m not sure why the umpire did not eject her from the game. If I were the coach on the other team, I’d have probably gotten thrown out complaining!
But in typical American social media response, here’s what has happened since.
- Megan has been called pretty much every name in the book. No amount of discipline is good enough for her!
- It is assumed that not only is she a terrible person but her family, and especially her parents are also terrible people to have raised such a horrible daughter.
- She has
been signed to play college softball and many have demanded her scholarship be revoked. - She has been hounded off social media by Twitter and Facebook bullies.
- She has received death threats.
- People have actually been driving by her house repeatedly. Police have had to take to patrolling, according to reports I read, because of the threats and because of suspicious activity near her home.
Note: the other team, while unhappy about the incidents, won the game and wants to let bygones be bygones. This is all driven by social media crazies.
- There is a pack mentality that develops in social media in which people gang up to bully those with whom they have a disagreement. These trends are prevelent.
- Someone points out an injustice (or at least a perceived injustice – it might be real, it might not) and addresses it. Then, the swarm forms and people begin to chime in. Person after person must add their voice to the din.
- Often, as the herd mentality develops, anger and insult get worse and worse.
- Those who disagree or defend are often steamrolled by the stampeding herd.
- The “offender” (real or perceived) is often labeled in the extreme. Megan was called the dirtiest softball player ever in the link I saw first. Really? Worst EVER? EVER?
- The pack digs in and goes for blood. At some point, basic human decency, respect, and courtesy are lost in the frenzy to destroy the enemy.
- The pack is often only content when the enemy is destroyed, or perhaps when there is a fresh kill to turn to.
Would that this tendency only occurred in sports, politics, entertainment, and other forms of social media., Would that the pack-mentality, bite-and-devour, kill-and-destroy attitude was absent from Christian social media. It is not.
The solution is Christ. Grace must become more than a soteriological buzzword, it must be our plan of operation. Love must be our norm. 1 Corinthians 13 must not simply be a passage read at weddings, then ignored. It must govern our actiions daily.
Megan Crosby made a mistake. But the social media wolfpack that sought to destroy her is more evil than anything she did at home plate on the softball field.
May the spirit that sought to destroy Megan Crosby be banished from among us in the Christian blogging world.
