Bullying vs Criticism

In my previous post I talked (or wrote some unorganized thought) about political correctness and how stupid it truly is, but I started thinking about a different, more specific topic, which is this fear of criticism that people have begun having in this modern age. All you hear about is “bullying” everywhere you look. Stories over the past year have been all about this bullying that people face, yet for the most part, all I see is legitimate criticisms blown out of proportion, while real bullying goes entirely unnoticed as socially acceptable. As long as the critical opinion is popular, it’s ok, but when it’s unpopular it becomes “bullying”; you never hear people say anymore that they defend a person’s right to say something, regardless of whether they agree or not, even though that’s something America is based on. People are even afraid just to THINK something unpopular nowadays, and live in fear of the tyranny of the majority, despite the majority being comprised of idiots. Certainly there are some cases, like when people follow someone around belittling them, but that’s just legitimate harassment and stalking. I’m sick of seeing this stuff about online harassment, when there are plenty of privacy controls to limit who you associate with; if you don’t like what somebody has to say, then you have the choice to completely ignore them.

What I was trying to really get at is when people do something stupid, and then get mad when people are critical of them; but, those that criticize have begun to cross certain lines into flat-out harassment over things that don’t even affect them, and that’s where I have a problem with “bullying”. My last post made it obvious that I’m in full support of somebody saying what they think without having to suffer physical consequences, like losing their job. I’ve seen numerous situations where a person says something that other weak-minded people find offensive, and they lost their jobs, which is their livelihood, over something they said.

An example is the girl who went to the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C. and there was a sign that basically said to not yell; the sign is completely pointless, because if you have to tell somebody to not yell at a monument devoted to fallen soldiers, then they’re already a hopeless, disrespectful person. So the girl took a picture where she pretended to yell in front of the sign, and this girl got absolutely hammered by people, despite staying within the rules and poking fun at the concept I just mentioned, and she ended up getting fired for nothing. She didn’t disobey any rules, and she wasn’t disrespecting fallen soldiers, no matter how many people think she did; the facts are quite clear, and she was well within her boundaries. Instead, their phony outage over something that doesn’t affect them in slightest, something they could have easily avoided, ended up causing her to lose her job, being fired by her politically correct, cowardly boss, and if I recall, she actually worked at a nursing home, a job I consider to be much more admirable than the banal jobs most of the people attacking her have. And we’re supposed to have freedom of speech, huh? Criticism of her is a different thing, but it became flat out harassment when people got her personal information, her job information, and started calling and harassing her work and home with death threats, and then she was harassed further by losing her job.

A counter-example to this was a girl who went to Halloween dressed as a marathon runner with severe leg injuries, in reference to the Boston Marathon Bombing, and the backlash got her fired as well. I can actually somewhat understand why this might bother people, as they believe her to be trivializing the tragedy. Ok, so if that’s the logic we’re following, then every person who dresses as a witch is “trivializing” the many female mutilations and deaths at the Salem Witch Trials; people who dress as a mummy are offending the old Egyptian culture; pirate costumes are disrespectful to the people who died after pirates raided their ship during the privateer age. People need to be consistent with their thoughts, and not add false context to certain things. You’re SUPPOSED to dress up for Halloween, and referencing a popular, if violent and sad, subject has nothing to do with disrespecting the incident.

This concept that things can only be referenced after periods of time is childish and inconsistent; if something wasn’t acceptable at the time, then it should NEVER be. Just because those people aren’t around to criticize it now, that doesn’t mean it’s right, but there is nothing wrong with making a caricature of a CONCEPT, rather than a specific instance or tragedy.You can criticize whatever you want, but once that transcends into an intent to harm a person physically or harm their livelihood and work, then it’s bullying. If somebody says or does something just stupid or morally wrong, socially ostracizing them is fine; it’s not bullying when somebody ACTUALLY does something along those lines, and ostracizing them isn’t an attack, but more of an avoidance. That’s how people learn from a young age how to be a civil person, and the more we turn our new generation into a bunch of wimps who are afraid of criticism, the more we are hurting our freedom of speech in the long run.