*If you follow me on Instagram you’ve already seen this but it is worth sharing.
“If you can’t say anything nice—come and sit by me.”
I know, I know, that runs counter to everything our mother’s taught us as children, otherwise known as the “Don’t say anything at all” rule.
I was the poster child for this way of thinking as a kid. But the minute I realized, around the age of twelve, that the girls who didn’t adhere to this dictum were so much more interesting and fun, well—you get the picture.
Us “nice sayers” were a boring bunch. We helped in the convent, populated the honor roll, made cupcakes for the bake sale, wore horizontal stripes on free dress day, and our blue and grey plaid skirts always touched just below the knee.
Our less well-mannered classmates were a raucous bunch. Ragtag and rebellious, sassy and cheeky, they were smart girls who talked openly about taboo topics, made up funny nicknames for all the nuns, and generally seemed to be having one hell of a good time.
Listen, if you can accomplish that in an uptight Catholic school, during the “duck and cover” days of the cold war, über repressed 1960’s—I have to tip my hat to you.
Secretly, I wanted to be just like them, flaunting the norms in favor of fun. It wasn’t unkind or hurtful. No one went home crying and nobody’s parents called the school to complain.
I hate to use this tired cliché but nothing fits better—It was good, clean, fun. Don’t confuse nice with kind. They’re not the same thing.
Eventually, I jumped ship, and by high school, if you couldn’t say anything particularly nice—you sat with our group of girls.
Now, at the risk of sounding like someone who waxes poetic at the memory of the ten-cent phone call—at a payphone—or music embedded into the grooves of acetate discs, these days of social media have taken “Not nice” to a whole new level. To me, it looks a lot like, well, hate.
Let me be blunt. People seem fucking MEAN.
If you don’t look, speak, or think like me—or live where and how I do—I fucking hate you.
What?
Not only do I not want to sit next to those people— I don’t want them anywhere near me!
It is my experience (which I admit at this point includes a minimum of tweeting and more just looking at the comments of the brave people who do) that Twitter is a cesspool filled with all of the ugly vitriol that repressed people who should have flown their fucking freak-flags back in middle-school should have already gotten out of their systems.
I’m just gonna come out and say it—I miss civility. I miss the days where all of the people with horrible ideas still lived under rocks. I miss the days where nicknames happened on the schoolyard, not in the President of the United States’s Twitter feed. I miss peaceful protest and bands of rivals, and humane politics (if there was ever such a thing). What has happened to civil public discourse over differences of opinion free of name-calling and public shaming? And when did cruelty get to be a thing? I miss the days when the majority of us could agree on what was cruel and what wasn’t—and we didn’t quote Bible verses to justify it.
And I really, really miss vinyl records.
Enjoy your weekend and carry on,
xox
