skrapnel

Have y’all heard about the super tan mom? She’s been charged with allegedly taking her 5-year old daughter to the tanning salon. She is the current talk of the Internet because she is so tan.

Buzzfeed, the source of everything meme-worthy on the Internet, captured 40 pictures of the Tan Mom in this post. I guess they posted it so people could laugh at how brown and burnt she is. Stripped of all humanity, she becomes a character–until you get to picture 38:

Tannest Mom and Daughter (via Buzzfeed)

Looking at this pic, you see a little girl looking at her mom with such loving eyes and a happy mom looking at her daughter. And while the outside world looks at this lady as a circus freak, I don’t think it’s my place to judge her obsession with tanning or this family’s relationship.

I’m not denying that she’s dangerously tan, but instead of judging her, we should, in fact, be using this moment to look inward, noticing that we all have our own little things we do to control our outer appearance. Some people starve themselves. Some people spend money they don’t have so they can present a better image of themselves. This lady likes to tan.

We’re all sick.

That’s kind of why I’m starting to hate how the Internet uses people. It makes us all feel like we are better people because we aren’t like this person. Everyone has a laugh, and then we all feel normal. What it actually does is keeps us from focusing on our own problems.

It reminds me of this quote from the Bible:

You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you’ll see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

-Matthew 7:5

Why don’t we judge the magazine editors, the TV producers, or the actors and models who continually force feed us an idea of what pretty or happy looks like? They’re the twisted mothers who make us feel like we can never live up to a certain standard. It’s time to evolve.