TemplarKormac
Political Atheist
I was on my Facebook feed earlier, doing Facebook things.
Yeah? So? Why am I telling you this? Is the political forum really the best place for something like this? It is actually. Because I witnessed the real life, real world consequences of using politically divisive rhetoric to attack someone, and I'm here to tell you about it.
You see, one of my Facebook friends is a lesbian, happily "married", who lives in Germany. She voted for Hillary Clinton, and a stark raving leftist, whom I've known for almost five years. As is should be obvious by now, I'm not naming names. Anyway we've managed to get along despite our plentiful political disagreements. During the election season, the nastiness of the political rhetoric had sunk to abysmal lows. Trump's election only proceeded to make it worse. She started on about how Trump's presidency was now a "threat" to her existence" (never mind the hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees Angela Merkel allowed into the country).
Still, we managed to have civil discussions about Trump and Hillary, but that wasn't the case for a friend of hers however, who was a Republican who voted for Trump herself.
This friend of hers did pay attention to my friend's political posts. However, my friend managed to take it too far, but not in the way you would expect.
"I found out today that a friend had passed. We weren't really close, but we were close enough that she was affected by my post election posts about how this coming presidency may be dangerous to my existence. She was cool like that. I told her that voting for Trump didn't make anyone bad and being a Republican didn't make anyone stupid, but that it meant that you know how bad and dangerous he is and you don't care" she said.
But then the post ended with what took her life.
"She killed herself." She concluded.
Using rhetoric like that usually doesn't cost life in any way (most of the time). But here, it drove someone to kill themself, because they were told the guy they voted for was dangerous, and that they didn't care how dangerous. What good friend does something like that? A friend who has been consumed by political hatred.
I will add that I don't necessarily know what underlying circumstances there were that were the driving factors in her friend committing suicide. But it was clear that those words, however measured they were, was what drove her friend over the edge.
That can be a consequence of politically divisive rhetoric. Please, I implore you to be careful.
Yeah? So? Why am I telling you this? Is the political forum really the best place for something like this? It is actually. Because I witnessed the real life, real world consequences of using politically divisive rhetoric to attack someone, and I'm here to tell you about it.
You see, one of my Facebook friends is a lesbian, happily "married", who lives in Germany. She voted for Hillary Clinton, and a stark raving leftist, whom I've known for almost five years. As is should be obvious by now, I'm not naming names. Anyway we've managed to get along despite our plentiful political disagreements. During the election season, the nastiness of the political rhetoric had sunk to abysmal lows. Trump's election only proceeded to make it worse. She started on about how Trump's presidency was now a "threat" to her existence" (never mind the hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees Angela Merkel allowed into the country).
Still, we managed to have civil discussions about Trump and Hillary, but that wasn't the case for a friend of hers however, who was a Republican who voted for Trump herself.
This friend of hers did pay attention to my friend's political posts. However, my friend managed to take it too far, but not in the way you would expect.
"I found out today that a friend had passed. We weren't really close, but we were close enough that she was affected by my post election posts about how this coming presidency may be dangerous to my existence. She was cool like that. I told her that voting for Trump didn't make anyone bad and being a Republican didn't make anyone stupid, but that it meant that you know how bad and dangerous he is and you don't care" she said.
But then the post ended with what took her life.
"She killed herself." She concluded.
Using rhetoric like that usually doesn't cost life in any way (most of the time). But here, it drove someone to kill themself, because they were told the guy they voted for was dangerous, and that they didn't care how dangerous. What good friend does something like that? A friend who has been consumed by political hatred.
I will add that I don't necessarily know what underlying circumstances there were that were the driving factors in her friend committing suicide. But it was clear that those words, however measured they were, was what drove her friend over the edge.
That can be a consequence of politically divisive rhetoric. Please, I implore you to be careful.
