Rude Awakenings
The past week saw a spike in public rudeness and incivility, at least in the worlds of politics and pop culture. By now, you’ve read the tweets and watched the YouTube clips of the various offenses, right?
Most of the incidents have led to multiple apologies (both sincere and compulsory), as well as a surplus of opinion and chatter that has confirmed the central role of Twitter and Facebook in relaying real-time commentary on breaking stories. But most of all, these outbursts have demonstrated, in often shocking fashion, just how impulsive, mean, and disrespectful the human heart can be.
Judging by the onslaught of news stories, and a flurry of status updates by my friends on Facebook, the outburst by Republican congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina during President Obama’s speech on health-care reform lies somewhere on the scale of infamy between embarrassing and traitorous — not nearly as bad as Oswald on the grassy knoll, but way worse than the Howard Dean