One of the things about the internet, it has caused more information to be spread faster into more hands than anything we knew previously. I remember in the 1980′s when CNN was considered radical. ”The 24 hour news cycle” was all the rage and the mainstream media tried to figure out ways to keep up.
Of course, they couldn’t because they serve too many masters, or didn’t embrace the technological changes quickly enough to take advantage.
I have noticed however, comments that are left on some blogs often are much coarser than the public discourse that would have happened pre-internet. Twitter can be very coarse in 140 characters.
Yesterday on Twitter, Chicago Crain’s reporter Ann Dwyer tweeted about some local legends from Chicago that passed away in 2013. Someone tweeted back at her:
@AnnDwyer_Crains @pointsnfigures too bad we can’t add rahm ,obama and jessie and madigan and quinn in fact all the useless pols in IL. TCOT
I happen to agree that those politicians are pretty misdirected when it comes to public policy-but I certainly abhor the sentiment in the tweet.
That sentiment permeates public discourse on the left as well. If you go to a site like TwitchyTeam, they document all the left wing nutjobs that wish death upon individuals that are conservative. Heck, Martin Bashir almost got away with it and he was an anchor on MSNBC. Daily Kos is one of the most hateful sites in the left wing blogosphere.
When Arizona Congresswomen Gabriel Giffords was shot, the left called for a “new civility”. Almost immediately, the left sunk down to deeper levels of incivility….That’s another story and the longer that we keep score and point fingers the less likely the level of discourse will be uplifted.
My response to the above tweet was that while I think there is plenty of room for anger in politics, there isn’t room to wish death upon anyone. Heck, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and I don’t agree on the methods to achieve political outcomes at all, yet we are friendly. I’d buy him a cup of coffee and chat with him if I saw him on the street.
Certainly, one of the greatest pieces of the United States government’s foundation is the Bill of Rights. In it, we are guaranteed a freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But, with that freedom comes responsibility. I have noticed that the press has fallen down in its responsibility to accurately report the news. Public discourse has gotten a lot rougher because the stakes seem so much higher.
People forget there is a responsibility that comes with freedom. Each line of the Bill of Rights protects citizens against intrusion from big government. Freedom of this, freedom of that. The right to own a firearm, the right to assemble, no unwarranted search and seizure etc. Exercising that right in a hateful manner drags the entire society down.
While I believe strongly that America is currently headed down the wrong path when it comes to a lot of the policies put in place over the last eight years, I do think that we need to think about the phrasing we use to attack those policies.
If we start to wish our opposition dead, and begin to act on it, then we aren’t any different than a totalitarian state like China, North Korea, WW2 Germany, Russia etc. I don’t want to live in a place like that.
UPDATE
wc inc reached out to me and wants me to take the tweet down. They are understandably embarrassed. Instead of taking it down, here is the tweet that they tweeted in the stream.
@AnnDwyer_Crains @pointsnfigures think you made a “Freudian” answer you said they “left the scene” you never said DEAD and neither did i
— wc winc (@wcwinc) December 27, 2013
Of course, what did they think that Lujack et al just moved out of Chicago?
From my Tumblr blog:
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