Message:I'm cynical, and don't falsely remember everyone being sweetness and light in my youth, as I was a bullied child and have plenty of stories of being insulted or physically assaulted by total strangers for no reason... Hell, my elementary/Jr. High bully who required me to be driven the 1/2 mile to/from school everyday to not be beaten by a gang of 8* is on death row for murdering his parents and brothers, hacking up the bodies with an ax, loading them into a car, driving the car to the desert and setting the whole shebang on fire, so, nah, I don't think people used to be nicer. Yeah, Red, you just learned a lot about why I was such an angry and clingy person when we met.
The internet just made it easier to spew shit without the fear of being punched in the face.
*Until 1985 when a summer growth spurt have me a foot of height and 70 lbs of mass in 4 months and I became able to fight them all off. Unfortunately, fighting them all off got me kicked out of the Fullerton Unified School District, and have a damn restraining order filed against me preventing me from going any FUSD property. I still have the tape of the Vice Principal of the school telling my parents I needed to be more like that "nice" (mass murderer) Eddie Charles. Yeah, when he was found guilty on four counts of murder ten years later, I set up a meeting with that Vice Principal, played that back, reminded her that Eddie was a mass murderer while I was working on my third college degree, called her out on issues regarding all the other bullying I took from other groups of students, AND TEACHERS. IN CLASS(which I also had - the teachers - on tape)! Generally, I got her to admit she was incompetent, and that she should have prevented abuse from students, rather than accept the rehearsed word of a group, and disciplined teachers who engaged in verbal abuse of students. On tape. That went to the District. The restraining order was rescinded, and that particular Vice Principal fired, because I, too, will serve up a plate of ice-cold vengeance.
Point being people didn't suddenly become nasty in the 21st century, just the entrance of information technology into the mainstream made the ugly much easier to express and to find.
My father's side of the family is Jewish. I shan't drag out the stories of when I've had to deal with literal damn skinheads dating back to the 1980's, except to recount one incident where, if I'd been one second slower, the car they drove up onto the sidewalk would have run me over, and, if it weren't for the intervention of the mechanics from the garage across the street, I would have taken a lot more damage than the one blow to the face. Or the time at the summer arts camp when ten kids burst into my room at 2am and I woke with a knee in my back, a sock in my mouth, hands trying to pull off my sweatpants and the packing tape with the threads in it being wound up my arms. Thank God for adrenalin, because I managed to NOT get dragged into the woods naked and tied to the tree where 30 other students were waiting to witness my humiliation. My summer camp "crime?" I and three other students at a morning assembly took to the stage to say it was uncool of the kids who had vandalized an art installation to do so. I was the only one of the four to suffer assault.
My point is people suck. We have always sucked. We're primates who learned a few things, and the entire core of civilization is in NOT killing that motherfucker pissing me off.
I stand by the profanity. I stand by the rights of the forum owners to edit it to meet their standards of content on the privately owned message board. But I stand by the profanity.
Yours,
IronMike
19-Sep-2021