People

I listened to podcast about Christian online behavior, and decided that yes, i should do things differently, not so much here as in comments in other places.  In particular, one-off comments of mine I sites I seldom go to have been harsh and unfair. Not that everything else has been exemplary, but those are my worst.

People being openly insulting does not arouse my ire that much. They know they are trying to wound or provoke.  I am well-defended against that after working with people in acute psychiatric crises for forty years. What gets me hopping are the people who are less obviously insulting but wound just as deeply. In particular, I am thinking of those who make general comments about some people/the people/those people who deny when called out that any individual insult was intended.  One of the reasons I got off Facebook is that my British/Scandinavian/New England family does this automatically. Some of these are calculated and deceitful, trying to inflict maximum pain while retaining maximum deniability.  Others are deceiving even themselves, rationalising that because no one was singled out, it was at most an if-the-shoe-fits-wear-it insult, quite mild; even gentle and Christian. 

Yeah, Christians who do this especially infuriate me.

The word "people" figures prominently in these statements.  Let me try to give both-sides examples to illustrate. Online yesterday I saw a mainstream news story that included a quote that "people who are agitating to open up aren't taking CoVid seriously and don't care about putting others at risk." I think that is mind-reading the motives of others and deeply insulting, and all the people who fall into that category burn a little bit when they read it.  OTOH, I saw a meme over at PJMedia accusing Americans of timidity and cowardice by comparing the courage of landing at Normandy to current CoVid behaviors. That is a personal insult to people being cautious. In both cases, I don't care about the deniability of "I'm just stating an opinion..." or "someone needs to say it that..." or any of the other excuses.  It is not an average-sized insulted distributed and diluted over millions of "people."  It is a separate, direct insult to millions of "people."

It's an insult even if it's generally true.  Even if an enormous percentage of people who want to open up are callous uncaring jerks and bastards, you don't know that about all of them. Some of them may have well thought out reasons for why they do what they do, and even if they turn out to be wrong, do not deserve your insult. Again, even if some Americans are being timid and cowardly, I don't think you can fairly apply that to all the people who disagree with you.  Which is what you are doing there.  As I have noted before, the very CoVid-cautious health care workers and first responders have every right to pop you in the snoot for that. Second point: Even for those for whom it is true, is that your preferred method for getting through to them?  Could be, but then others might have some fair insults for you.  I posted last month about the obligation to truth versus kindness in the Church, and retain my preference for the former.  But I'd rather have both and even more, I may be wrong on that. Third, it might not be very true at all.  You may be basing your mind-reading of them on projection plus confirmation bias.

It's been going on for years "Men who keep saying that...," "I think those Christians who are voting for Bush...," "Those college students who think they understand..." "Some people think that because they are black..." There are no general men or Christians or college students or black people, there are only individual ones.  You are talking to each one separately.  And they are torqued off.

I could give a similar both sides example on the prominent public voices in the current racial divide.  I just checked out the usual suspects from my wife's FB account and it's there "The people who are complaining about the looting...," "Those people who don't believe in privilege...," "I notice that some people are claiming..."

Those are not general comments. They are individual comments put in deniable form. Deniable to accusers, or deniable to yourself, I don't know.  That's likely along a continuum.

It's not entirely invalid.  I've done it myself many times.  I just did it here a couple of times. But when I do it I try to hold my own blameability before me, I try to see if my side of the argument is doing the same thing, I try to make clear distinctions who I am talking about and who I am not (and who is in-between) and especially I try to picture the people I know who fall into that category.

Not that I necessarily do any of those things well. Yet we should always try to be better than we are without claiming to be better than we are.