Most of the time, you have to apologize for what you do say. The insults. The bad jokes. The unintentionally offensive but still offensive terminology. The proverbial toothpaste out of the tube (I hated that demonstration—don’t like the smell of toothpaste).
Other times, though, you have to apologize for not saying something when you should have said it.
This is one of those other times.
Two weeks ago this morning, the following three tweets were posted from Donald Trump’s Twitter account in rapid succession:
And I said nothing.
But I should have said something.
This is what I should have said:
When the tweets were out and had simmered for a while (maybe fifteen or twenty minutes—long enough that people were getting riled but not long enough that there were a lot of jokes out on the subject) I should have tweeted the following, not in response to the president, but in an independent tweet:
“LIBERATE THE #NIT!”
The exclamation point is important, for parallelism. The hashtag is important, for branding. I wouldn’t have included the quotation marks in the actual tweet (in case you were worried).
Judging by the performance of comparably entertaining tweets of mine, this would have received approximately seven likes and approximately two retweets, one from my roommate under pressure (“c’mon man, you like politics”). It may not sound like much, but in the fight to place the NIT back where it belongs atop the college basketball postseason tournament hierarchy, it would have been worthwhile.
I will not be tweeting it now. The timing isn’t right. It might even confuse some people. But I will be more diligent in the future about how to spin the president’s tweetstorms into jokes that better my engagement numbers and improve the NIT’s hopes. I apologize for dropping the ball this time. Sometimes, the toothpaste needs to come out of the tube.
