Bye-Bye, Birdie

      To my readers who follow "Ailantha" on Twitter, I apologize from my heart, but this will be my last blog post on that platform. You can still follow "Ailantha" by going to the website, www.ailantha.com, or you can always find my posts on my Facebook page. Again, I'm sorry for the inconvenience.
       But I'm quitting Twitter. And not because Elon Musk took over, per se,

...but because he no sooner acquired this ubiquitous social media platform than he used it to  circulate a mean lie about the brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
       A little over a week ago an unhinged QAnon extremist broke into Pelosi's San Francisco home in the middle of the night looking for Speaker Pelosi to, in his own words, "seriously harm her."​ He found instead her husband Paul, whose skull he fractured  with a hammer. 
​      Right away a lie was made up and posted by a right-wing website, the Santa Monica Observer, which is  known for pushing various fabrications and false conspiracy theories. The lie was  that 82-year-old Paul Pelosi came home drunk from a gay bar with a male prostitute and was later injured when the two got into a half-naked spat.
        But it was Elon Musk who spread that lie along with a link to the website of its origin in a tweet that went viral.     

       Of course, after his repulsive tweet drew public outrage, Elon Musk, in typical Elon Musk style, deleted the tweet, but only after it had taken wing and flown around the world, was shared and re-tweeted a million times over and reveled in by the likes of Donald Trump Jr.,    

...who tweeted a photo of underwear and a hammer with the caption, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”
     I honestly don't understand such hard-heartedness in people. If the elderly spouse of a politician I didn't like was attacked and terrorized and had their bones broken with a hammer I wouldn't think it was funny. I'd be horrified.  I'd feel sympathy for them and their suffering family. 
     And yet here's Elon Musk spreading a demeaning lie about Paul Pelosi while the man was undergoing surgery to repair his shattered skull. There's Donald Trump Jr. mocking Mr. Pelosi. Here's the Republican candidate for Governor of Arizona Kari Lake quipping at a campaign rally that, “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. — apparently her house doesn’t have a lot of protection."   ​

     And there's Republican Governor of Virginia Glen Youngkin bantering to a crowd that, “Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s husband had a break-in last night in their house, and he was assaulted. There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re gonna send her back to be with him in California. That’s what we’re going to go do.”​

       I don't understand people like that. Such callousness towards the suffering of others. Such cruelty. 
         Well, there's nothing I can do about the minds and hearts of those people. But I can quit Twitter.
       True, I'm only one of 450 million people who use Twitter, and subtracting one-450-millionth from the sum total may not amount to much difference. But, then again, who knows? In any case, we all do what we can.
       Good-bye, Twitter.