Why the Notre Dame fire opened my eyes to how awful humanity has gotten

Wiki Commons/ Notre Dame on Fire/ Anonymous Photog.

The internet has peaked in disrespect last week after countless users decided Notre Dame’s tragic fire was a perfect opportunity to flaunt their wealth.

The Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France experienced a fire on April 15 that destroyed the top half of the cathedral, taking down the iconic towering steeple.

The Cathedral was built in 1163 and is considered the “Mecca” of Catholicism because it is the primary figure of Catholic religious prevalence in Europe.

Millions of people visit Paris every year and post photos on social media from their trips. This is acceptable within reasonable time of visiting but in my opinion, the fiery tragedy is not the appropriate time to post throwback photos.

Scrolling through Instagram around this tragedy was so incredibly revolting due to the flooding of photos from people flaunting their wealth at the same moment, across the globe, as a religious monument was engulfed in flames.

Notre Dame is iconic and attracts a lot of press because of the religious artifacts contained inside the cathedral. They were the forefront on the people of Paris’ mind, while which photos to post on social media in “support” of the fire was on the minds of every disrespectful individual with a smart phone who has happened to visit Paris within their lifetime.

What I want to know is why people thought it would be okay to take this time when the people of Paris and the Catholic religion were in panic and mourning for their beloved cathedral to post about their vacations on social media. These ‘influencers’ and wealthy individuals thought it was appropriate to show off  online like “Hey I’ve been to Notre Dame! Look at me! Like this picture!”

It was because of the large outpour of posts that the fire started to trend on all major social media platforms, which in hand caught the attention of wealthy people around the world who took time to reflect on their time spent in Paris, publicly.

Because of the outpour of posts on social media making the minimal loss of artifacts during the fire seem worse than it actually was, may I remind you there were no deaths and we could count on one hand how many artifacts were damaged, the rich of the world started a Go Fund Me to rebuild the cathedral which by the way is impossible to reproduce the exact same way in 2019 than it was built 856 years ago.

Millions of dollars have been donated by wealthy and bandwagoning individuals to help rebuild the Notre Dame Cathedral which should not be refurbished because it will never be the same. To top it off, trees do not grow tall enough in Europe anymore to rebuild the roof exactly the same way. If they decide to use the donated money to rebuild, it will be refurbished, yet will never look exactly the same, which I feel is incorrect and disrespectful to the original designers.

The millions of dollars donated to help rebuild the cathedral could have been donated to more domestic and important problems, for example the great garbage patch, the flint water crisis, Puerto Rico, the homelessness epidemic, and the list of more important issues could go on before we hit the impossible rebuild of Notre Dame.

The priceless artwork within the building were saved. The only large iconic piece of the cathedral that was burned was the steeple and that is not something needing to be reproduced thousand years later. The pews that were damaged also cannot be possibly reproduced, only replaced and the Catholic Church has enough money to replace pews on their own.

All in all, priceless items were not damaged, people suck, rich people suck, stop posting stuff on social media the second you get a whiff of a tragedy.

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