Mean Girls

I dip into the Twitter-verse a few of times a week. A few sites I tend to follow, like The Talk, Food Network, HDTV and several of their hosts or programs. But I am often tempted to abandon the field altogether when an epidemic of mean-spirited vitriol erupts.

Heaven knows I can be as volatile and short-tempered as anyone. But the shriveling spitefulness of some of the threads on Twitter sickens me. Why? Why verbally flay someone, not just for their opinions but for their appearance, education, sexual proclivities, ethnicity? Why eviscerate everyone who is the slightest bit different? Why shame those whose bodies do not meet your arbitrary standards?

I confess. Most people walking the planet earth do not measure up to my unspoken "standards". I don't like boring. I don't like bigots. I detest the obnoxiously persistently stupid. I expect my friends to have robust senses of humor. I like people willing to leave me alone until I am in the mood to socialize. But that does not mean I am ready to consign all others to the bottomless pit of anonymous character assassination. I just try to gently break away (except when I am angry and let them have it with both (figurative) barrels).

As a misfit during the four most socially miserable years of my life (high school), I was well acquainted with mean girls. Fortunately most of them "married young and then retired". But some of them, and their male counterparts, have found a place on Twitter making the experience occasionally quite unpleasant for the rest of us.

I abandoned Reddit several years ago because the unforgiving, consistently condemning level of coment bore no resemblance to constructive discourse. Really trying to stick it out with Twitter but there is a limit to the bull-shit I can stomach.