Since I have been back in Canada, I find that I am way more in touch with friends and acquaintances who live here, and with current events that affect North America. This is likely because I am living in the correct time zone, and I have ample access to coverage of events as they happen.  As such, I get to see how people react to these events in real time, and I have to say that I have noticed a trend that bothers me a great deal. I see people reacting to events, to simple news stories, or to decisions that should not even be news with extreme outrage, disproportionate to the event in question.

There are several events from the week that passed that highlight this for me.  There was a story in our local newspaper about a single mom who went to the food bank, despite the fact that many felt that she was living beyond her means, and not in fact poor; the decision by the City of New York to at first hold, and then cancel/postpone the NYC Marathon; the announcement that Shopper’s Drug Mart made with regards to their decision to suspend the playing of Christmas music in their stores for a few more weeks; and a story that a friend of mine told me, where she had a close call when driving, acknowledged that she came close to hitting the other car and apologized.  In each of these cases, many of the reactions that I witnessed were instant outrage.

The responders voiced, typed, or gestured their opinion with little thought to the impact on those reading or experiencing it.  In the case of my friend, the other driver followed her down the road and continued to yell and gesture at her in extreme anger.  THEY endangered far more people than her close call had, and the bottom line is that no one was hurt, and there was no damage to any property. In all of the other examples, the anger and aggression was directed at all parties – those who made the decisions, those who supported, and those who were against it.  In many cases, those who were most vocal were seemingly the farthest removed from the issue.

In some ways, it is the type of behaviour that I would attribute to the regular trolls that are seen in the most online forums, who seem to need to share their negative views on absolutely everything that they see and read; they aren’t.  These are also people that I know, in person and online, whose reactions seem out of character with the people who are sharing them.  I wonder why, all of a sudden, I see this.  Have they always been like this? Am I just now more sensitive?

I find it odd to say this, as one who has been (rightly) accused of overreacting to things on more than one occasion, but I just don’t understand where all this vitriol and anger is coming from, and how it is really productive in the grand scheme of things.  I’d much rather see a reasoned argument as why something is “wrong” in a person’s eyes, or a civil discussion about the merits of different points of view than read a hate laced rant about the absurdity of the decisions made.