Daniel Tilson
Sometimes it takes an in-your-face personal experience to remind you how bad a public problem has become.
I’m talking about the ever-spreading epidemic of politically motivated, technologically insulated online incivility and awfulness.
Now don’t go thinking I’ve gone all soft and squishy about taking the heat that Internet trolls and over-baked critics can cook up.
To the contrary, as a political blogger and social media consultant, I’m well versed and well equipped in dealing with Molotov cocktail throwers littering the online landscape.
But this was something different; a red flag right before the 2014 Florida legislative session and midterm election battles to follow.
The other day I had shared a personal story with Facebook friends, about my kid coming up with a “Rich Republican” first verse rewrite of This Land Is Your Land.
“This land is my land, it’s only my land, from MYlifornia to the New York MEland…”
What can I tell you? The kid lived through the 2012 Obama-Romney race with her mom and dad heavily involved in it, TV coverage turned on a lot, much discussion in the air … and drew her own conclusions, apparently – albeit influenced by her folks.
Not surprising, then, that she and friends started in on just such a song parody during school recess — especially after appearing in an “American Celebration” concert that morning featuring This Land and other patriotic songs.
Their parody was the first thing she wanted to tell me when I picked her up from school. Gave us both a good laugh.
Took her home and, with Mrs. T out of town on business, set about helping her with homework and making dinner. Checked in briefly on Facebook, shared her song parody as the cute family story of my day.
When I checked back later, there were a series of comments on the post from a guy named “Dave” — a Facebook “friend” I had never heard of who somehow slipped through the cracks and into my social network.
But there he was like a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. And the story about my kid’s song parody – admittedly influenced by liberal views — is what it took to light his fuse.
His comments stood out because they so quickly escalated in such unexpectedly irrational and ugly ways.
No debate about why or how a kid these days might get the idea that rich Republicans have their own special sense of … entitlement.
Just personal attacks, starting with calling my daughter a “bigot” and ending with:
“You better quit ****ing that little girl of yours kiddie fiddler before someone reports your stupid a** to the police.”
So of course I blocked him, reported him, all that.
And I get that he might suffer from mental illness, or substance abuse.
But what I also got is a reminder that too many of us — myself included – have taken a pass, to varying degrees at various times, on self-restraint in our online political discourse.
Anger and frustration boil over. We substitute raw expression for reasoned articulation. Instead of “calling out” politicians, pundits, people and policies that make us mad, and explaining why, we call them names and wish them wicked fates.
With Gov. Rick Scott and other conservative Republicans who are seeking reelection incurring the wrath of so many Florida liberals like me, it’s easy to fall into that trap, especially in the word-limited worlds of Twitter and Facebook.
But let’s not. Let’s be and do better.
Otherwise, we’re tilling our social network soil to grow the kind of toxic ugliness none of us wants to be exposed to.
A New York University graduate, Daniel Tilson owns a Boca Raton-based firm, Full Cup Media, offering “a la carte” and custom-bundled packages of communication services.
