We live in a world of trolls. Message boards, AM radio, Westboro Baptist – you name it, the trolls are everywhere. At some point, a certain segment of people decided that it would be fun to go around looking to cause trouble. And it has become impossible to deal with them – you seem to have a choice between ignoring them and letting them go unchallenged, or engaging with them…which never seems to end well.
The problem becomes what I call the “smoking-on-the-platform effect” – it’s against the rules to smoke on the train platform, but somebody lights up anyway, and as soon as you call them on it, you are equally the asshole. I don’t know how this happened, but could make a couple of guesses – mostly stemming from white people who learned exactly the wrong lesson from civil disobedience and from a culture that privileges both sides equally no matter how far out on the seesaw one may be relative to the other.
The point is, the guy blows his smoke all over the platform, and you can tell him off or point out the rules, but he will continue to blow his smoke – usually with his middle finger up, which is generally the intent anyway – until he runs out of cigarettes or until he is forcibly stopped from smoking. Which makes people quail a bit – do you really want to call the police because a guy’s smoking? Now, what if there are no police and it’s on you to make it stand up? Or rather, what if despite the signs there’s actually no black-letter law that says you can’t smoke?
Take a turn through your typical metropolitan newspaper’s comment section and you’ll figure out what I’m talking about pretty quick. Hell, there’s a Greasemonkey extension for Firefox just to block all comments at al.com, which is proverbial for the craptastic quality of its conversation. The only thing that ever seems to have made a dent in all the nonsense is Slashdot’s famous system of community moderation and meta-moderation, where reading at +3 and up will filter most of the horseshit.
But it all boils down to the same thing. Turn it off. Walk away. Let it go. Block it out. The trick is, can you do that? And more importantly, what happens while you’re looking the other way? Long story short: what are you prepared to do?
I am not entirely sure they are all trolls (thus are actively trying to stir the pot). I think many of them are so self-absorbed in believing that whatever they think is “right” and just expressing their arseholes…er…opinions. Which to me is more damning to society. If people are just trying to be anarchist or emo or cool or whatever, you can hope they will at one point change (or get lung cancer and die so they can no longer smoke on the platform), but with those that are spouting off with the belief that God told them they are speaking the Truth, well that is a delusion that no amount of Haldol can diminish.