I agree. You shouldn't be an asshole. You shouldn't take baseballs from kids. You shouldn't call people racist names in Walmart parking lots. If you do those things, people aren't going to like you, people won't want to hire you, people won't want to associate with you.
But that said, the seek and destroy track that we've apparently decided to take, as a society, made possible and exacerbated by social media, is not making things better. We don't have fewer assholes. Racism isn't receding. People aren't treating each other with more kindness.
That hell bent retribution is making society a worse place to live, a more coarse place to live. As I said earlier, a puritanical state.
Think about it. 25 years ago if some asshole starts spewing racist nonsense at a person in a parking lot, who heard it or saw it? The racist asshole, the victim, and maybe a handful of witnesses, tops.
Today, through the wonders of social media, millions of people will watch it and listen to it. Do you think that makes this world a better place? It sure isn't causing racist behavior to stop. So yeah, you might get the perp fired, but at what cost to society?
Instead, what it does is coarsen us to a point where even the most vile of diatribes doesn't have the same impact on us that it would have had three decades ago. That's why the attorneys in the Rodney King criminal trials made a point not to keep the video away from the jury, but to show it to them as many times as they could. It doesn't have the same impact the 50th time you watch it.
I don't have a good answer. Racist, bigoted ideas need the exposure of public light, so that they can be debated and exposed and rejected. But we're on steroids here, and we're not heading in a good direction.
