Listening to a podcast the other day, a the juxtaposition of two flag stories prominent in local news came up.
Well, one local, one international.
In Abbotsford, city council had decided to fly the Rainbow flag, a symbol of pride and solidarity with those who embrace relationships outside of what might be called, ‘traditional’ (i.e. a man and a woman)
In other news, people all over the states were calling for the abolishing of the confederate flag.
So what do we have here? Two flags that minority groups find offensive: Gay pride flag, confederate flag.
The minority that would find the Rainbow flag offensive would be many Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and perhaps others.
The group that finds the confederate flag offensive is African Americans.
The big question is: "why is it assumed that one flag is clearly offensive and should be taken down, and the other should be put up?"
The answer has to do with minority (the bullied) and the majority (the bullies). The reason why culture thinks the rainbow flag is good, is because it represents the bullied and confederate flag represents the bullies.
Therefore, the bully's flag must come down, and the flag of the bullied must go up.
Here we see one of the deepest values of western culture:
"down with bullies and everything they stand for, up with the bullied and everything they stand for."
All good so far, right?
One problem: who decides who the bullies are, and who the bullied are?
Well, the majority. Those with power and influence.
This is a scary proposition. Why?
Because at one time, those who believed slavery was okay was the majority. Furthermore, throughout history, it has been those who have power and influence who have DONE the bullying.
My point being this:
We have put our selves in a precarious position indeed, when those of power and influence decide who is the bully and who is the bullied. What if they turn on your group next? What if they turn on you individually?
Please be careful when you demonize an individual or group. The way to get people to hate and feel okay about it today is to say, ‘Look at what bullies these people are!'
This is already happening in our culture. If you are bored already, I understand. I'm waaaay over 150 characters.
However, below I have compiled some excerpts in which we see the cruelty that is justified in the name if 'sticking it to the bully'.
Eventually I started to wonder about the recipients of our shamings, the real humans who were the virtual targets of these campaigns. So for the past two years, I’ve been interviewing individuals like Justine Sacco: everyday people pilloried brutally, most often for posting some poorly considered joke on social media.
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One person I met was Lindsey Stone, a 32-year-old Massachusetts woman who posed for a photograph while mocking a sign at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns. Stone had stood next to the sign, which asks for “Silence and Respect,” pretending to scream and flip the bird. She and her co-worker Jamie, who posted the picture on Facebook, had a running joke about disobeying signs — smoking in front of No Smoking signs, for example — and documenting it. But shorn of this context, her picture appeared to be a joke not about a sign but about the war dead. Worse, Jamie didn’t realize that her mobile uploads were visible to the public.
Four weeks later, Stone and Jamie were out celebrating Jamie’s birthday when their phones started vibrating repeatedly. Someone had found the photo and brought it to the attention of hordes of online strangers. Soon there was a wildly popular “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page. The next morning, there were news cameras outside her home; when she showed up to her job, at a program for developmentally disabled adults, she was told to hand over her keys. (“After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client,” read one of the thousands of Facebook messages denouncing her. “Woman needs help.”) She barely left home for the year that followed, racked by PTSD, depression and insomnia. “I didn’t want to be seen by anyone,” she told me last March at her home in Plymouth, Mass. “I didn’t want people looking at me.”
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“that girl at Halloween who dressed as a Boston Marathon victim. I felt so terrible for her.” She meant Alicia Ann Lynch, 22, who posted a photo of herself in her Halloween costume on Twitter. Lynch wore a running outfit and had smeared her face, arms and legs with fake blood. After an actual victim of the Boston Marathon bombing tweeted at her, “You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died,” people unearthed Lynch’s personal information and sent her and her friends threatening messages. Lynch was reportedly let go from her job as well.
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I met a man who, in early 2013, had been sitting at a conference for tech developers in Santa Clara, Calif., when a stupid joke popped into his head. It was about the attachments for computers and mobile devices that are commonly called dongles. He murmured the joke to his friend sitting next to him, he told me. “It was so bad, I don’t remember the exact words,” he said. “Something about a fictitious piece of hardware that has a really big dongle, a ridiculous dongle. . . . It wasn’t even conversation-level volume.”
Moments later, he half-noticed when a woman one row in front of them stood up, turned around and took a photograph. He thought she was taking a crowd shot, so he looked straight ahead, trying to avoid ruining her picture. It’s a little painful to look at the photograph now, knowing what was coming.
The woman had, in fact, overheard the joke. She considered it to be emblematic of the gender imbalance that plagues the tech industry and the toxic, male-dominated corporate culture that arises from it. She tweeted the picture to her 9,209 followers with the caption: “Not cool. Jokes about . . . ‘big’ dongles right behind me.” Ten minutes later, he and his friend were taken into a quiet room at the conference and asked to explain themselves. A day later, his boss called him into his office, and he was fired.
“I packed up all my stuff in a box,” he told me. (Like Stone and Sacco, he had never before talked on the record about what happened to him. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further damaging his career.) “I went outside to call my wife. I’m not one to shed tears, but” — he paused — “when I got in the car with my wife I just. . . . I’ve got three kids. Getting fired was terrifying.”
The woman who took the photograph, Adria Richards, soon felt the wrath of the crowd herself. The man responsible for the dongle joke had posted about losing his job on Hacker News, an online forum popular with developers. This led to a backlash from the other end of the political spectrum. So-called men’s rights activists and anonymous trolls bombarded Richards with death threats on Twitter and Facebook. Someone tweeted Richards’s home address along with a photograph of a beheaded woman with duct tape over her mouth. Fearing for her life, she left her home, sleeping on friends’ couches for the remainder of the year.
Next, her employer’s website went down. Someone had launched a DDoS attack, which overwhelms a site’s servers with repeated requests. SendGrid, her employer, was told the attacks would stop if Richards was fired. That same day she was publicly let go.
“I cried a lot during this time, journaled and escaped by watching movies,” she later said to me in an email. “SendGrid threw me under the bus. I felt betrayed. I felt abandoned. I felt ashamed. I felt rejected. I felt alone.
If you have read this far, I hope you will take a moment and consider these real people before you think that one act of ‘bullying’ means that any act of cruelty is justified.
I cleaned my room today before I sat down to work. 
