David McElroy

There was a time when I was mostly worried about politicians lying to me. These days, I’m just as afraid of the vicious lies from political activists, online and otherwise. The ones who know they’re lying are bad enough, but the really scary ones are those who are so full of hatred that they have no room for nuance — or even truth.

Truth can be a nebulous concept to an angry person. For someone who is filled with rage and is convinced that the other side — whichever that “other side” might be — consists of evil people, anything is justified as long as he strikes out at those enemies. If he lies a little in spreading his message, well, the other sides is even worse about that. Besides, since it’s the only way to get people to listen to the ultimate truth, a little lying is justified to get their attention.

You can’t just give a reasoned opinion today if you want to be heard. You have to scream. You have to be angry. You have to demonize the people who disagree with you. If you try to be reasonable and understand why different people see the world in ways that are different from your ways, the truth is that your voice is going to get lost in the crowd. It’s going to take a lot longer to be heard. It’s a lot more work and there are fewer immediate rewards.

So many people who write and speak to the world politically take short cuts. They lie when it suits their needs. They don’t worry about little things such as fairness. They don’t worry about holding themselves to a higher standard than they expect of “the enemy.” And they scream their message to a willing audience that’s angry, too, and will amplify the message by way of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media tools.

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I’ve come to the conclusion that most people are confused about what “free speech” means. It seems as though rude people want to use it as a way to avoid the consequences of their rudeness. I think it’s time we realized what free speech really means — and I also think it’s time for more of us to stand up for public civility.

In a discussion on my Facebook page, a woman decided to act out her childhood anger with people where she grew up by calling everybody in the state “inbreds.” I told her that she was being rude and insulting to others, in addition to being inaccurate. After a few minutes of a thread involving six or eight people — all letting her know she was in the wrong — she finally played her trump card.

“What happened to free speech?” she whined.

Nothing happened to free speech, but as my friend Ike Pigott responded, “Speech is free, the consequences aren’t.”

We’ve become a rude and mean society, with many people believing that it’s acceptable to verbally trash others at will — and also believing that they’re being infringed upon if anyone calls them on the behavior. Sometimes the rudeness is political. Sometimes it’s cultural or based in some form of “tribalism.” And other times, it’s just based on saying what feels good at the moment, for various emotional reasons.

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It was almost 1 a.m. by the time I came out of Walmart one night. I didn’t have many items, but I rolled my purchases out to the car on a shopping cart because I had a huge bag of dog food that I didn’t want to carry. It had been raining hard while I was in the store, but there was a break in the rain while I walked out and loaded the car. Then the rain started again.

The parking lot was virtually deserted and there were shopping carts left abandoned in various places, presumably by people who didn’t want to take the time in the rain to put the carts in the places where they belonged. But I found myself walking the empty cart over to the cart corral — or whatever they call it these days — as the rain came pounding down on me.

As I ran back to the car, I laughed at myself for going to the trouble of putting the cart in the right place in the downpour. I briefly wondered why I bothered. After all, there were plenty of other carts all over the parking lot. Mine would have been just one more. There was nobody out there to see me, so nobody would have even known I hadn’t put it where it was supposed to go. Despite those things, I immediately knew why I’d done it.

I’d returned the cart to the proper place simply because I had decided — at some distant time in the past that I don’t even recall — that I was the kind of person who always put the cart up. I’d seen — and disapproved of — many people over the years who left carts in random places in parking lots. So I’d unconsciously programmed myself. I had decided that I wasn’t like that — and that programming gently led me to walk with a cart in the rain when others wouldn’t.

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