A regular poster on this thread PM'd me about the recent JRB posts. I won't identify who since they chose to be private, but they said "What he DOES is bait people! Everyone has learned it,
no one does anything except laugh-- he's playing Archie Bunker, only cold hearted."
The poster encouraged me to ignore the posts because JRB is beneath me.
I agree that he is beneath me, but I don't agree that the posts should be ignored. I believe that hate speech needs to be brought out in the open and addressed. If it is swept under the rug or ignored, it only festers, and eventually hurts people who don't have the ability to fight back. Since I have the ability to fight back verbally, I feel an obligation to do so.
I think Archie Bunker is a fairly good description of JRB. But Archie was only valuable as a lesson because there were others around him who pointed out how cruel his thinking really was, and how sick his way of looking at the world had become. An Archie Bunker without Edith, and his daughter and son-in-law (Rob Reiner -- what were their stage names?) might give some degree of validation to the hate speech that filled Archie.
JRB, too, is filled with hate which comes out in hate speech. I think he thinks he is being funny, but frankly I don't find hate speech funny. I have sat on the sidelines for some time, but I finally decided it was time to call him what he in reality is. |
