I posted this as a comment earlier today, and after one commenter suggested I post it in its own diary, I am doing so, with some rewrites.
With some Kossacks feeling Alyssa Douglas, who posted a tweet wishing death on Barack Obama as explained in this diary by therehastobeaway, should be thrown in jail for as long as 40 years, and that her life will, and should, be ruined, I ask you to consider the possibility that Alyssa has actually been wildly successful in achieving her aim.
And it’s not the death of Obama.
Curious about her motivation, I read all other tweets by her that I could. Since then I have copy-pasted them into a Word file, which I can provide on request, as her Twitter account now no longer exists.
From that reading I concluded some things very different from what other people were postulating about her and why she posted the tweet (assuming it really was her). Jump the lovely squiggle to read them.
1) She is apolitical. There is not a single other tweet on anything related to politics—no disagreement with Obama’s vision or politics, no RW talking points, no carping about issues—nothing. It’s all personal stuff. She is not acting from a political attitude that she has picked up from parents or school or talk radio or where she lives, else we’d see that.
2) She is not racist. There are two tweets I recall that could be taken as racist, but seem to be there more for shock value. In other tweet she professes love for “Kanye” which I assume means Kanye West. There is certainly no consistent agenda against non-whites.
3) She is not stupid. Her spelling and grammar are better than much of what you see on Twitter, and she shows some wit.
4) She feels unloved and is very needful. A huge number of her tweets are fights with males, entreaties or demands for love that are not directed to particular people, or depressed musings. If it’s teen angst, it’s pretty severe.
5) She is full of rage. This comes across very strongly almost immediately.
6) She is very concerned about appearance and dresses provocatively. You can see this in the pics. Putting this together with the previous, I am going to guess that she is taking the futile but common female strategy of offering sex in the hope of receiving love.
7) Her parents are invisible. The only family members mentioned are a grandmother who she clearly loves, and a brother who’s graduating. Generally for 16-year-old parents are still huge in their lives.
8) There are addiction signs. Mention of drinking, drugs, etc. Other subtle hints of self-destructiveness, and pushing the edges of acceptable behaviour. She talks about her “dark side” and is determined to have no regrets.
Consider some other things about the assassination tweet:
1) It came at the same time that Obama was receiving max public and media attention. 50,000+ tweets per minute while he was speaking.
2) It’s, again, totally out of her usual range of interest and in fact out of character. There is anger, but no other calls for anyone’s death in her tweets, even males who’ve jilted her.
3) She tweeted this attached to her real name and knowing that plenty of info about her is available on the internet.
To me this all adds up to, first, that she doesn’t actually want Obama dead, and second, it’s a scream a) of rage and b) for attention. People who want it badly enough don’t care whether it’s positive or negative, and they know how to manipulate others’ emotions to get it. You all live in a country where presidents have been assassinated and fears for this president’s life are very real, and last night was a peak moment of impressiveness for him—that made many Americans easy pickings to have their emotions triggered by such a tweet. Possibly she wanted to embarrass her parents, too, even at her own expense. Perhaps some of it comes out of envy; if she was watching live, she’d have seen the love Obama and Michelle have for their own teenage daughters, indeed the amazing love that was in the room.
The Secret Service? They’re trained to discern between threats and non-threats. First thing they’d have done was looked at her other tweets and figured out all this stuff, probably much faster than I have. She might not even get a stern talking-to, let alone arrested. If her life is ruined, it is probably no more than she already feels it is, or indeed is; she does not have a stable mind.
What she has attained so far is instant Internet celebrity, or more exactly, notoriety. Probably she is joyously basking in it, because, as I said before, positive or negative makes no difference to someone desperate enough. Does that mean that you should punish her for manipulating you? I can understand the resentment, but consider also that Internet notoriety will not solve her problem. She will be forgotten within days and still desperate for love. Only chance of something good coming out of this is if it leads to her getting solid mental health help. If somewhere in the back of her mind, she was seeking that, too, well, tell the truth, I hope she was, and I also hope it works.