If you’ve ever stumbled upon the Facebook page, The Cooler Connection, you’ll know that it’s a delightful community where women share ideas about how to paint kick ass coolers. Usually it’s so filled with compliments, pan love, and estrogen that every single user’s cycle aligns with each others’.
Until yesterday.
One girl decided to speak up on a topic she felt passionately about, which is a pretty common occurrence in America. And on the internet.
At first, I read it and was like “okay cool, whatever.” This girl just felt like venting and speaking out about something. No big. But then, as my newsfeed kept getting cluttered with this post, I realized that it was not “no big deal.” It was, apparently, a very big deal. This one comment has received over 1,000 likes. Pretty big for a post about painting. But, for every supporter of this topic, there seems to be even more opposed. So many opposed, in fact, that it’s literally being called “#coolergate2k15.” Don’t you just love a good scandal? There are currently hundreds of comments on this one post, ranging from supportive, nasty, hilarious, offensive, and utterly irrelevant. And since you called it…
Here’s a little glimpse into what people are saying about this topic.
And this wasn’t even the best, or the worst, of it. So, what does this mean? Well, personally, I think it means something pretty freaking amazing. As young women who are entering into the world, it’s important that we don’t just accept things laying down. Sure, some people might think that this reflects badly on Greek life or southern life or American life or whatever. But honestly? I don’t think that’s the case. As one wise commenter pointed out, we have the freedom of speech in America. Unfortunately, a lot of us don’t utilize that out of fear. Not fear of our lives, like in some countries, but fear of being ostracized. Fear of being trolled. Fear of being told we’re “wrong.”
Is our generation becoming too “victimized?” Eh, I don’t know. Do we need to be more considerate of other people’s feelings? Quite possibly. But whatever it is that our generation needs to do, we’re not going to get there by sitting on our asses and avoiding the “heated” topics. And God damn, it’s a heated topic. I’ll give you that. But you know what? It’s also extremely empowering to see women speak out about their viewpoints on race, free speech, and the right to paint whatever the hell they’d like on a cooler..
[via The Cooler Connection]