Just this past week a post on my Zihuatanejo-Ixtapa & Troncones Mexico Message Board regarding the possible source of a local recent rumor turned into something quite different, quite argumentative and quite amusing to me, but only because I’ve learned not to take most folks as seriously as they think they should be taken. Nevertheless, arguments on the internet are never pretty sights to most viewers, even less so to people looking for a relaxing getaway from inclement weather, their jobs and their daily lives. I have deleted it from my Message Board for obvious reasons, though I aready knew from the subject of the original post that it was not a message thread I intended on saving for very long.
The original post had a link to a news article about the arrest of an alleged criminal and speculated on the source of the rumor regarding child abuctions that had circulated in Zihuatanejo during late February and early March. The first inane reply came almost immediately and said “that’s why god invented bullets”. Meaning the alleged criminal accused of the child abductions for organ harvesting or whatever should be shot and not even have evidence against him presented at a trial. Since the person posting was one of my favorite “conservative types” (you know the type) I of course couldn’t resist a little jibe and a little personal entertainment (yes, I can be a bit of a mindfucker at times when things are dull). What’s amusing about an argument? Well, I’m pretty sure I’m not one of the brightest bulbs on the tree, but it amuses me to no end how much dimmer most people seem to be, but of course I could be wrong because as I said, I ain’t the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer. Not even close.
So in reply to what I fondly referred to as the comment about GOD’S OWN BULLETS , I wrote something like: “Were those the same bullets used to massacre the indigenous folks in what is now the USA?” I could have just as easily written: “Were those the same bullets used to assassinate Lincoln, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Jr. or the children at Sandy Hook Elementary?”
Immediately the outrage began! First someone claimed that the Native Americans were happy on their reservations. Someone else claimed that disease killed most of them. Someone else even wrote that there were now over two and a half million Native Americans in the USA (which actually got a burst of laughter out loud from me). But not only did all these people miss the point, they ignored it glaringly. Dodge and change the subject, attack the messenger, argue about inanities. Almost immediately one person claimed I was an anti-American sexist and chauvinist, which of course got a couple of attaboys from the female peanut gallery, whom I suspect had been drinking wine.
Not one other person seemed to care about the larger question I actually touched upon by my original reply to GOD’S OWN BULLETS, to wit: injustice in the name of religion. No, they were so deep in denial and woe and caught up in the White Man’s Burden that a tirade was unleashed against me accusing me of everything from being anti-American to Communist (as if those would be labels that should cause me anguish) as well as a sexist and chauvinist.
I’ve lost count of the times in my life when some ill-mannered and disrespectful angry fool pretended to tell me what I am, and most times I simply shrug off the attempted chides because I don’t suffer fools lightly and there’s no sense in arguing with people’s prejudices. While I enjoy my freedom more than most people, I am not so foolish as to be so free with my inner self that I reveal myself to strangers or even to most people. My wife knows me. My mother knows me. My family knows me. My friends know me. But folks who have mostly never even met me and only read what I write on my Message Board don’t know anything about me of substance because I learned quite young, before I was even a teen, that you have to have different images to different sectors of people, you can’t just be yourself in front of everybody. Just like you probably don’t discuss much about your sex life with strangers, I keep most of myself private. But since I’m not exactly the cleverest ape in the tree, of course I could be wrong.
So when one particularly ill-mannered and disrespectful angry person on my Message Board pretended to pigeonhole me, I of course couldn’t resist the temptation to play the easy winning hand and publicly admonish her since the entire affair was simply just a silly game of mine to begin with and the angry players lost so rotundly.
But the icing on the cake came when the same ill-mannered and disrespectful angry person revealed her true hateful, mean-spirited and conservative self by calling another person who corrected her a “Robette”, a term originally coined and used on a website forum that has been gone for many years and that many of my readers who knew of it jokingly referred to as the “Blue Board”, because they were all such a sad and sorry lot of mostly angry, bitter, hateful, envious, and conservative blowhards. She might as well have just rolled up her sleeve and showed us her stupid tattoo. 😉
I’ll try to play nicer.