Today was the inauguration of the President. And, like clockwork, they came out.
“A reckless trillions of dollars a year spender and a supporter of homosexual marriage taking the country down morally and spirtually President.”
“Poor Republicans, going the way of the dodo bird…Can’t say we’ll miss you guys, Good riddance.”
“King Obama has outlined his ideas for America -Jobs of course are not part of the plan.”
“Lets see, over 500 Filibusters and counting, think anything can be done, if the Racist GOP would have just passed the jobs bill and at least half of the others, this country would be in good shap…”
And that’s just in the first page of comments. I can go to almost any article — except, perhaps, the notice of Huell Howser’s death — and find someone hating. Our society seems to be consumed with the goal of saying something bad about the other side. The Internet has amplified the voices. Anyone can seemingly post anything, anonymously, in response to anything and then run away. There’s no longer any responsibility for what you say. You can be an anonymous bully.
I even see this attitude from people I know can think and think well. You get into certain areas, and “click” — off goes the brain. You name the area — politics, Congress, gun control, women’s rights, unions. It’s all that they are bad and I am right. We’ve lost the ability to understand the other side’s point of view. We’ve lost the ability to recognize that all sides in a discussion may have grains of truth and fears driving them. More importantly, we’ve lost the ability to address those fears and concerns, and to recognize what true compromise is. Compromise is not “my way or the highway”, despite what both parties think. Compromise is finding a middle ground; finding that solution where you gain some and you lose some. Compromise is finding a solution that you don’t like, but you can barely live with. Each solution where all sides give a little and all side get a little moves us solely, inexorably, to a better place.
I’m not saying this as someone without blame. I look back on how I behaved when Bush was President, and I’ll admit I didn’t behave well. Calling someone a village idiot is not the right way to behave. We can all learn to be better (even us old dogs like me).
So, in honor of the inauguration, in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and in honor of my birthday, I ask you to drop the hating. Don’t make fun or denigrate that which you oppose just because it’s fun, because it’s your persona, or because it’s easy. Take time to learn — understand the other side of an issue and speak from a position of facts not “Internet truth” (Remember: just because you read something on the Internet — or see a picture or quote on Facebook — doesn’t make it true. Abraham Lincoln once said that.). Don’t feel that you must get the last word in. Your goal in a discussion is to understand the other side, and for them to understand you–not for them to agree with you. And most importantly, be reasonable, not hot-headed. The Internet aggravates our tendency for speaking in anger (or hearing anger in speech). Go out of your way to be nice, and find the middle ground.
That is my wish.
We’ve lost the ability to understand the other side’s point of view. We’ve lost the ability to recognize that all sides in a discussion may have grains of truth and fears driving them.
Are you not doing the same thing by treating a lack of tact as something equivalent to hate speech?
I can’t see anything particularly hateful about any of the four quotes you included here, including the Republican ones. In fact, they all seem relatively mild.
Yes, they are highly negative about the other side. They are blunt. They lack any kind of sense of diplomacy. They go for snark at the expense of a logical defense of their viewpoints. But hateful?
There IS plenty of bona fide hate speech online. Such truly hateful comments can also be found on virtually any news article. What you’ve cited as an example is very mild.
It doesn’t take much of a stretch to turn the particular snarky comments you mentioned into actual political points:
“A reckless trillions of dollars a year spender and a supporter of homosexual marriage taking the country down morally and spirtually President.”
If you’re a deficit hawk, then no doubt much of President Obama’s spending is reckless to you. While the point is debatable, saying as much isn’t hateful.
As far as homosexual marriage, a lot of people oppose it for a variety of reasons, some hateful and some not. I don’t think that merely stating that you believe that homosexual marriage is against your spiritual values or that it damages your view of morality is hateful in itself. Wrong, yes, but not necessarily hateful.
“Poor Republicans, going the way of the dodo bird…Can’t say we’ll miss you guys, Good riddance.”
It’s a fact that many Republican positions are considered irrelevant to the lives and views of a lot of people. It’s also a fact that the Republican Party is strained nearly to the breaking point by infighting. And a lot of people aren’t shedding any tears over those things. Some may even be gloating about it. Not sure what’s hateful here.
“King Obama has outlined his ideas for America -Jobs of course are not part of the plan.”
Whether President Obama’s policies will create jobs in the numbers we need is a point of honest disagreement among a lot of people. Yes, “king” is snarky and disrespectful. But not seeing what’s hateful here either.
“Lets see, over 500 Filibusters and counting, think anything can be done, if the Racist GOP would have just passed the jobs bill and at least half of the others, this country would be in good shap…”
There have been over 500 Republican filibusters and other obstructionist tactics in the Senate. Many viewpoints within the GOP can very plausibly be considered racist. And again, people have different viewpoints on the jobs issue. Not seeing how it’s hateful to point any of this out.
I understand I cited mild examples. They were what just caught my eye going over the first page of comments. But I also want to make clear that I wasn’t just talking about politics. For example, from an article about Texans Losing their Accents, you see comments like:
My comment was based on the fact that people seem to want to comment and bring down and ridicule and bully. There is intense hatred out there of “the other”, whether that other is based on political party, skin color, economic status, sexual status, or anything that makes them different from you. That is the culture we need to fight.
The winning side always calls for less rancorous speech. They feel safe and secure, and forget all the hard negative speech they promulgated when they were losing. Of course you don’t feel the need for negative speech-you’re getting most of what you want, your choice for president is in charge. Would you be advocating less negative speech if McCain had won, if he were appointing anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court, if he were rolling back gay rights in the military? In other words, if politics were outraging you, would you still think everybody should just get along?
I would be arguing that we should tone down the rhetoric and discuss the issues from facts, not viral posts. I’m not saying everyone must agree, but the tone has gotten too filled with hate for “the other”.
Although I used politics as an example, this hate speech shows up everywhere. In another comment response, I cited a comment on a post about texans losing their twang. Here’s another from a post about the Sacramento Kings moving to Seattle; KJ refers to Kevin Johnson, mayor of Sacramento:
Or perhaps this comment, from an article about digital projectors killing off the drive in (which I plan to write about in the next day or two):
There is an attitude in society today that we need to be verbally beat up other people. We’ve lost the civilization we used to have. *That’s* what I’m ranting against; we’re having discourse, but it sure isn’t very civil.