TRY TAKING this, if you will, with whatever grain of your choosing. But if you only think about it hard enough, other people’s opinions are solely their own and nobody else’s. As such, they should never really affect you in the first place. I guess that’s where “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” got its inspiration from.
I read somewhere in an article that people are mostly afraid of three things. In any order, they are: fear of getting old, the fear of dying, and fear of other people’s opinions. No tongue in cheese this one, but if this weren’t true and that wasn’t a serious study, they must still rank pretty close up there among our Pandora’s box of fears.
In case you’re wondering how this piece came to be, it’s really just a sort of shotgun/umbrella reply to several friends who’ve problems with opinionated fellas, the curse of modern times. The first, a fellow senior and a poet at that, just suddenly vanished from social media right after the pandemic, to the surprise of many. Curious and mostly worried about her, I reached out and asked what was wrong. Nothing really, was her drawn-out reply. It’s just that comments on her work and other posts have been quite toxic, she said, and she has opted for the more life.
Another sensitive old soul likewise shared the same view. This time, she somehow felt that her continued word wars with online orcs (more savage than trolls) on her political stance had managed a direct hit to her health, particularly her BP, so that her partner cautioned, “Is it really worth it?” “What are you defending them for when they don’t even know you as a person?” were his armor-piercing words to her.
As I’ve written in the past, I made one comment about a popular basketball player on his being hailed as Most Valuable Player, and to my surprise, the next day, my thread was flooded with hate messages from all over. Forty-nine, I counted, and that stuck with me for a long time. One thing I learned, though, trolls or orcs, limited in their vocabulary, could definitely read.
For my last entry, a doctor was in a serious disagreement with another ex-classmate, and it had come close to severing friendship ties of so many years. Fortunately, cooler heads had them patch up their differences, yet he still harbored a few aches. Despite lines being drawn now, I added as advice, just think, that you both agree to disagree and leave it at that. Forget those aches, and if possible, just respect each other’s opinions.
As a last tip, today’s climate has indeed empowered every single breathing human to finally voice out their mind, even at the cost of their lives. Quite roughly, while Paul Simon’s classic, Sound of Silence may have talked about blind submission, it might also pass as a reference to our present state at the moment. People talking without speaking and people hearing without listening. On a lighter note, the Bee Gees have a go at it. It’s only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away.
Trolls and Orcs get ready, get set… Go!
