It is a different thing to stand face-to-face with someone whom you have perhaps done wrong than it is to sit on a laptop somewhere and let the bile fly while the Twitterverse watches.
Many memorable things happened in Grade 6, when I had the good fortune to be in the classroom of James Grant, whom I wrote about recently in this space.
One of them occurred in the shoulder period when kids returned from lunch and milled around inside Sir Charles Tupper School, before getting back to the important business of memorizing multiplication tables and learning the order of the planets in the solar system.
I think I said something on the mean side about a girl named Liza Miller, who was among the long list of female classmates that I used to steal glances at, because she had taken offence to it.
I saw an old picture of that class recently. She was as I remember her, red hair and freckles, with the whiff of a cross-me-at-your-peril expression.
I do remember her as tart of tongue, although that may just have been my experience at the moment in question when she informed me, “You think everybody likes you. But nobody likes you,” as the rest of the class watched.
Now you may think it sad that I can still recount this minor long-ago, elementary school humiliation.
But the reason I bring it up is that Ms. Miller did not go on Twitter and troll me. She did not post memes of a tomato with my name underneath.
She rightly called me out on something. I learned from the moment. Civility was maintained, even in a Grade 6 classroom.
Because it is a different thing to stand face-to-face with someone whom you have perhaps done wrong than it is to sit on a laptop somewhere and let the bile fly while the Twitterverse watches.
I’m not remotely suggesting we were better people than we are now.
I just know that when I was a younger man you held your tongue if you didn’t want the matter to be settled out in the schoolyard, back before hands-are-for-helping-not-hurting became the mantra.
You learned not to shoot off your lip if that resulted in you standing outside after school, with a fine dust of tooth particles floating around in your mouth. You did tend to keep your powder dry when an argument on the high school basketball court, with one of your best friends, ended up with you concussed in the waiting room at the ER.
I’m in no way condoning right-crossing someone you disagree with.
Sharp tongues cut both ways
My point is that with the historic restraints now removed, civilized discourse is on the wane, particularly online where so much of the bad behaviour takes place.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this: Donald Trump’s tweeting that four congresswomen, all Democrats, — three of them born in the United States and none of them white — should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019
His words were egregious enough to earn a stinging rebuke by the Democrat-led Congress, but also made support for him marginally increase among Republicans, according to a Reuters poll.
On social media, as you can imagine, the vitriol did fly against remarks that so many characterized as racist.
But the online slanging goes both ways these days.
Closer to home, Lindsay Shepherd, a free speech advocate and Wilfrid Laurier University grad student, was permanently banned from Twitter the other day, a decision she characterizes as another example of the platform’s overzealous censorship of right-leaning public figures.
Shepherd, if the name doesn’t ring a bell, made international headlines when she was disciplined by Laurier for bringing Jordan Peterson’s controversial views on personal pronouns into her classroom.
Her Twitter ban stems from an online beef with Vancouver, B.C.-based Jessica Yaniv, who describes herself on Twitter as a “model, product reviewer, digital marketing expert, LGBTQ2SIA & human rights activist.”
As far as I can tell, the pair had been jousting back and forth online. Things took a nastier turn when Yaniv began insulting Shepherd’s infant son and her genitalia.
“At least I have a uterus, you fat old man,” Shepherd responded in words that I feel confident in saying were never uttered back on the Sir Charles Tupper school field in the mid-1960s.
We had a real beef, we settled it the old way: after school, maybe at noontime.
Not much talking since there were no stinging wits like Liza Miller among us.
But there were rules (“Boots or no boots?”). And if somebody drew blood we usually stopped right then and there, feeling that was a line that a person simply should not cross.
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