Americans seem increasingly adept at talking vitriolic nonsense, a festering malignancy that reflects declining educational standards, and which has been exaggerated by the cloaking capabilities of the Internet.
Just the same, I’m not sure it was a good idea for Mayor England to take the recent “death threats” to the city council and make them public.
To begin, exaggerating a lesser threat runs the risk of imbuing it with unwarranted credence. We’re not talking Al Qaeda here, folks, although an element of the dynamic remains consistent. Drunk, sober, real or imagined, a person choosing to make a threat in any situation wishes to alter the dynamic by insinuating a possibility of physical violence.
Most of it is bluster and bluff from the terminally doltish, but if making such threats public manages to frighten anyone, then it’s a mission accomplished by the bully. My gut feeling is that this should have been handled by the police without public notification until after the fact, when it could be done coolly and dispassionately rather than interjected when it was.
My wife disagrees, correctly noting that the current anger fetish making its way among those fearing impending marginalization (read: angry whites, many male, some not) provides justification for some of the unwashed and unbalanced among them to shift their rage from an Internet portal or telephone call and transform it into the realm of the physical, and that these buds are nest nipped early.
Hard to argue with those lines of thought, either.
However, now that these “death threats” are public, it would be a fine time for all elected officials in New Albany to make a public pledge of opposition to violence of any form – written, verbal or physical. This could come as a written, signed statement from City Hall, and a resolution from the council.
Anyone offering odds on whether councilmen Dan Coffey and Steve Price would abstain?
Isn't this a pertinent juncture for the revival of a Human Rights Commission?
Discussion?
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2 comments:
I agree with your wife...too often threats have been dismissed as being just ignorant ramblings, only to have something actually happen. Society can no longer afford to ignore that type of behavior because more and more, we're seeing the consequences of it. If these people are moronic enough to call someone's cell phone and leave a threatening message, they're probable off-kilter enough to do something.
I wouldn't want to take the chance that it was just someone trying to scare me. We used to receive threats at the state office I worked at all the time and we'd always call the police. Some people (in the words of Bluegill) "just ain't right".
Threats? Police? Where have I heard this story before?
When Coffey threatened me and then lied to the police about it, Price mounted a mini PR campaign to tell people it didn't really happen. That effort fell short, though, when he got someone on the phone who, unlike him, was actually there when the threats were made.
If Coffey or Price were to sign off on denouncing threats, it would just be one more violent, hypocritical act in their ongoing secession from integrity.
That said, I should have called the police at the moment the threats happened and had Coffey hauled off to jail on the spot. It's where his behavior indicates he belongs, right along side the caller who was just following his lead.
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