Just my 'pinion: Smack talk and death threats.

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?