On the heels of my last post, where I love on my bloggy family, comes the news about Nic and the TSA. When I first read her story, I felt righteous indignation on her behalf; I thought her writing was a bit overwrought, but very few of us (and certainly not me) are beyond using dramatic language to convey a sense of the emotion we felt in a given situation. I sort of shook my head and dismissed her tweets about selling her story, since it seemed to me like adrenaline-driven ranting. And to be honest, I’m fine with that, because on Twitter I find that there’s a lot of sarcasm, in jokes, exaggeration, and revealing comments that people would probably not say face-to-face. These are the tweets I kind of shrug off and ignore, in general.
When I woke up the next morning to a tweet from TSABlogTeam pointing me towards their blog post in response to Nic (I assume they messaged me because I RT’d Nic’s post because “everyone else is doing it” — yes, I gave in to peer pressure), I had to go check it out. I didn’t watch the entire video. I didn’t need to. I just read the words, the comments left by visitors, and the tweets just beginning to buzz among my friends: Nic’s story didn’t ring true.
I watched the ranting on Twitter: “Nic’s in hiding! Why isn’t she responding to the TSA?” Nic had posted that she was going on a cross-country flight, and I tried to calm one person by telling her this, but to no avail. The witch hunt had begun. The judgments were being handed out, and there was no way to stop them.
This is when I started to feel angry at Nic. I believed her. I have been talking with her off-and-on since July; I’d call her a casual friend of mine. Certainly, she owes me nothing, but I have seen her be so supportive, kind, and friendly to people, to me, that I never expected deception from her. I could have accepted if she added some melodrama and exaggeration to her tale for the sake of a “better” story.
Then she posted her apology, and I got angrier. All I got out of it was that she accused the TSA of doctoring the video footage.
REALLY, Nic? REALLY? Please. Give your readers, and yourself, more credit than that. If you lied, own up to it. Yeah, you fucked up — on a pretty grand scale, at that — but you know what? A lot of us were rooting for you. As messed up as it might sound in retrospect, we wanted you to have been wronged. We wanted your story to be true, so much so that we never questioned it. So much so that when the TSA came out with their side, we felt personally wronged, and betrayed. We felt like you used our goodwill towards you as cheap currency … for what? I don’t believe you wrote that passionate post and asked us to RT it for pageviews. So what did we help you achieve? And why did you need to use us to achieve it?
Those questions are, I think, at the root of my anger towards her. I trusted Nic, and now that trust has been broken.
If Nic messaged me tomorrow asking for love and support, I’d offer her whatever I could. My anger doesn’t preclude me from worrying about her and her family, nor does it allow me to shrug off the insults and vitriol being spewed at her.
Above all else, though, I’m left with one abiding concern:
What else has Nic lied to us about?
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