I recently saw this Instagram post from Benny Johnson about the video of Selena Gomez crying about the Trump administration’s deportations of illegal immigrants. Johnson, and various other right-leaning people whom he quotes in his post, argue that Gomez should instead be crying about all of the people killed by fentanyl overdoses, the people murdered and/or raped by illegal immigrants, and the 300,000 migrant children who have gone missing.
While I don’t agree with the sexist stereotypes in the post regarding which ages and genders of people tend to be the victims of which types of crimes (people of either gender and any age can be raped, and people of either gender can overdose on fentanyl), nor do I agree with the characterization of Gomez’s video as a “meltdown” (that’s insulting to autistic people because a meltdown is a term used to describe an autistic person’s involuntary reaction to a sensorily or otherwise overwhelming situation), I do think that the post makes some valid points.
Riley Gaines, one of the people quoted in Johnson’s post, points out: “Laken Riley was one of many. Selena Gomez did not cry for her.”
This is true. And it reminded me of another thing that Selena Gomez did not cry about: the statues that were brutally and viciously destroyed at the hands of the BLM movement and “woke” ideology. Selena Gomez did not cry for the soldier statues whose heads were smashed to pieces with sledgehammers in Portsmouth, Virginia as people cheered and a brass band played. She did not cry for the statues hung with nooses from traffic lights in a North Carolina town. She did not cry for Christopher Columbus, lynched on the steps of the Minnesota state capitol as his murderers raised their hands in triumph and posed for photos with his pitiful, face-down body. She did not cry for Robert E. Lee when his head was sawed from his body and his face sliced off before he was placed into a white-hot furnace and reduced to molten bronze.
I’m going to stop giving examples, because thinking about these atrocities and typing the words to describe them makes me feel sick to my stomach. And these are only a few examples among hundreds. To say that I’ve cried for what happened to these statues is an understatement. Over the past four and a half years, I’ve sobbed uncontrollably on more occasions than I can count, wailed, screamed until my voice was hoarse, punched walls, thrown furniture, and shed enough tears to fill an ocean. I’ve experienced pain so intense, so agonizing, and so excruciating that it is impossible to fully describe. No words can do it justice. What happened to these statues is the most angering, saddening, heartbreaking thing that has ever taken place in the world.
For Selena Gomez to cry for what is happening with illegal immigrants, while ignoring the far worse situation that has happened and that continues to happen with statues, demonstrates a complete lack of both logic and empathy. What happened to these statues – not what is happening with illegal immigrants – is what is actually upsetting. What happened to these statues is what Selena Gomez should be crying for. In fact, what happened to these statues is what everyone should be crying for. The entire population should be unanimously shouting from the rooftops, screaming at the top of their lungs, protesting in the streets, demanding justice, for what happened to these statues.
But Selena Gomez doesn’t care about the statues, and neither do most people. To cry about immigrants being deported, but not about the statues, demonstrates a lack of empathy on the part of both Selena Gomez and society as a whole.