If you are like many millennials out there, then you had lunch with Harambe today and posted about it on social media. Maybe you even sent one of the various Harambe memes to your group chat to get a laugh or two. 

But did you ever stop to think about why in the world everyone is freaking out over a gorilla? 

By now, most everyone knows who Harambe was. He was the 17-year-old silverback gorilla who was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo after a child fell into the exhibit. 

The buzz surrounding Harambe’s death is high on this list of conversation topics for 2016. If you were to overhear a conversation on the street tomorrow, there is a strong probability that it would either be about Trump or Harambe. But has this conversation gone just a little too far?

Shortly after the accident, discussions strayed from being focused on children’s safety in public places and the rightful treatment of animals to one that has purely become focused on humorous memes and tweets about a gorilla. 

This is not to say that these memes and tweets are not funny because they are. Who doesn’t want to see a tweet about how some kid replaced all of the family photos in his house with portraits of Harambe?

But it is 2016, and we are obsessed with a gorilla to the point where “#RIPHarambe” is viral on Twitter.

What happened was a terrible accident but a child’s life was at stake. The ongoing arguments on whether or not the parents should be at fault for not having their kid on a leash do not really matter in the grand scheme of things, and neither do these memes.

It happened. A kid fell into the gorilla exhibit and we cannot change the outcome. Tweeting funny memes back and forth between you and your friends is not going to do anything to change what happened. 

But did it really have to become such a huge joke?

Of course the people of the internet can continue as they please and can go on making a joke out of the ill-fated Harambe. But if they continue to do so, people will fail to realize that all of this social media attention is probably taking things a bit too far. 

It is keeping conversations away from more important topics that could actually enact change in the world. Continuing to talk about bringing Harambe back is not going to bring him back.

We have had our laughs, but it has been several months since Harambe’s death. It is about time the people of the internet let the Harambe memes and tweets rest in peace.

Paidin Dermody is the opinions editor of the Kentucky Kernel.