Profile Pics

It’s a hard thing to note when general trends stop/die out.  You can only do it form afar, time wise – I suppose that’s why they say hindsight is 2020 vision.  I make this statement of obvious as I noticed that I no longer see people’s profile picture on Facebook as a picture of Madeleine McCann (I worried about the spelling of her name here, as one should respect the spelling of the name of probably dead chidren).

That anyone would have done this in the first place is one of the things that I can’t make work in my head.  I don’t really want it to make sense though – for me I don’t want to recognise some degree of similarity in the brains of these people.  It’s the same as the other end of the scale with racists and peadophiles’, why do people say “I don’t understand why you would fancy a child;hate a person because they’re a colour/religion, et”.  You’re not supposed to, if their reasoning made sense to you then you’d be a paedophile nazi (not to mention a Sun reader, ironically).  Not for the first time I’ve meandered away from the point…oh yeah….

So these people whose thought process was something like It’s terrible that that innocent little girl has been kidnapped*, I feel so helpless there must be something I can do to help that poor, poor family.  But what?  What can I do? Wait a minute…yes…if i change my profile picture on the internet site I go on everyday, to send people fictional cocktails or work out what I would look like if I was a caravan, then that will help.  Surely when I decide to challenge someone to a game of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ and rather than my face they see a picture of a small child they will see what a caring individual I am.  And then i will be doing something to help.  It’s definitely not a completely pointless exercise which though I believe is something significant and will somehow find a missing child(even though the only people who will see this are approximately 100 people who i know from school/college/current place of work and almost certainly know about the whole story anyway but wont think it is weird, in fact 30 or so of the women on my friends list will actually do the same), is actually just a gesture to show what a great person I am.

Or something like that.  But when did they decide it was no longer helpful.  Was it a wholesale movement and all change within a few days from these people who need to go out of their way to let it know they hate child killers?? (Everyone does dickheads).  I’m assuming there wasn’t an internal dialogue where they pretty much rationalised that it had been a few weeks too many and she was probably dead.  I think it was more likely someone put a picture on from a night out where they looked hilarious/attractive and their sense-of-humour/vanity took over the tremendous sense of humanity which had made them put a little ‘kidnapped’ girl’s face where theirs should have been. 

I shouldn’t complain though, it means they aren’t there anymore much like Mad….no, no that’s just in poor taste – it’s too soon

*These people didn’t entertain the notion that it was …you know….