It’s been a bit of a funny day. Went out to the gym earlier, all well and good, then came home to an email from said gym saying that they were closing at 4pm due to the potential for “protests” later in the evening.
I have, of course, heard about the wave of racist riots that have been breaking out in various places across the nation recently, but somehow you never think of it happening close to you. So I won’t lie, I was a little bit concerned — even if with our position on the outskirts of the city proper, we were unlikely to see anything particularly untoward happening.
Looking through the local newspaper’s coverage of the evening’s happenings, what appears to have happened is that several hundred anti-racism counter-protestors turned up in the town centre where the racists were rumoured to be gathering, and found themselves confronted with maybe four or five actual racists. So I think we’re probably okay here.
What I did find funny, however, was the comments section underneath the local paper’s reporting on the situation, which almost entirely looked like this:
Looking at this — and scrolling down the many, many pages of it — really drove something home: while foul and odious people with noxious viewpoints most certainly do exist in this day and age, and that is something we as a society are going to have to deal with in some way, a significant proportion of them aren’t willing to actually go and do anything beyond typing some impotently angry comments into their computer.
This, of course, isn’t to downplay the very real and very serious situations that have occurred elsewhere, but I am not at all surprised to see that the rumours of riots breaking out all across the country turned out to be exaggeration and/or misinformation. I’ve seen far too many examples of “keyboard warriors” over the course of the last decade or so to believe that many of them will actually take to the streets and start real trouble — and that’s probably for the best.
Of course, you can still cause plenty of trouble from your computer chair through harassment, doxxing and suchlike — and believe me, having been on the receiving end of both, I know exactly how unpleasant and scary it can be — but at least these impotent, red-faced, gurning idiots aren’t out there breaking windows, setting fire to things and inflicting real injuries — or worse — on innocent people. So we should probably be thankful for small mercies.
I suspect the country as a whole isn’t out of this dangerous period it’s in, but at least the potential worry for this evening is seemingly over and done with for now. So I guess now we wait and see how long it takes for things to return to whatever passes for “normal” these days.
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