Output 38—To Shame or Not to Shame

Where was I? Oh yes… Shame. I’m not going to do it to people anymore.

That’s going to be a far more Herculean effort than just “getting off social media” or a “screentime detox.” It’s going to take a deep examination and commitment. But I just can’t participate in this anymore. I really hate to say this, but EVERYONE, even the person we find loathsome, is the product of an entire life of experiences and learning. Are everyone’s beliefs worthy of respect? No. But I do deeply believe that every human being is worthy of respect, even people whose beliefs I loathe (except people who hold extreme wealth and power and use them only to increase their own wealth and power and think respect is their DUE. They can fuck off. But I’m incapable of shaming them anyway because they’re psychopathic narcissists. I DO NOT believe this exception includes the average, wealth- and power-less Trump voter. THOSE are the people I plan to stop shaming. Sorry bout it).

Let me tell you (all 17 of you) a story. Some of you may have heard it before, but probably not fully.

A few years ago, I participated in a public shaming on Facebook. The individual I helped shame had a psychotic break soon thereafter and last month, was found dead in an abandoned building in Los Angeles. I don’t know if it was a suicide, a murder, or an overdose. But I believe that what she experienced, which I participated in, led to her death. I didn’t say that when I posted about her on Facebook after I learned she’d died. I just said I hoped she was at peace. But I need to talk about it from another angle.

K was someone I had, apparently, met without realizing it when I hopped on the pile-on. She had interviewed for a job at my office and wasn’t hired because she seemed drunk. But when she left a rather bizarre review on a local music club’s Facebook page, calling the bartenders rude hipster “cookie beards," I joined the comment party, because she was just so outlandish and poetic in her accusations. I commented that the cookie beards had probably refused to serve her because drunk.

A couple of days later I was informed that I was on a “hit list."

K had made a list of everyone who had commented on her Facebook review and posted it on her personal page. The list was made on paper shaped like a cow. She had written “Poke the bull, get the horns” at the top of the list.

I perused her profile and saw that it was full of weird grievances and personal drama and I decided not to worry about it. Then K showed up at my office. I sort of remembered her from her earlier job application and assumed she was there to talk about that—I didn’t connect her with the FB post. But she was asking all kinds of cryptic questions about ME. She asked where my boss was, I told her he’d just left, she fled the office hoping to find him and “report” me, apparently. After she exited the building, she was shut out. The doors locked automatically at 4pm. Thank goodness.

After I left work, I got more messages. K had posted a video on her Facebook page–a video of her wandering the halls of my building looking for my office while singing a song about murdering me.

I called the police and while they said they normally are hands off with online disputes, because she had physically confronted me and ESPECIALLY because of the video she posted, I was able to file a report. They went to her place, seized two guns, and arrested her. This was first of many jail stints, both in GP and in psych. I ended up successfully getting an EPO in family court here. I never engaged with her after her initial confrontation in my office. Others on her list weren’t as successful. She got smarter about how directly she confronted people, and some people “on the list” seemed to crave the attention involved in attempting to “warn the community” and “get her help.” They were the ones who kept experiencing threats and harassment. She left me alone.

K began an online campaign against “Gangstalking.” She flipped the script—she wasn’t stalking US, WE were stalking HER. There are more than a few people across America who are members of the “Gangstalking community.” They have YouTube channels, podcasts, Quora pages, Substacks. I know this because Al followed her online activity and sent me reports. K was very active. She claimed to be making a documentary about Gangstalking with Vice News. She was having some kind of YouTube war with another Gangstalking “victim.” She was in the desert. She was back in Lexington. She was in jail again. She was continuing her crusade, no matter what.

And then after a few years of this, she died in an abandoned building in Los Angeles.

Of course I am not saying her death was my fault. She was obviously already severely mentally ill and since I really stopped engaging with her very quickly, I doubt I was on her mind.

But I know what I did. And I know it triggered her final “quest." She was a stranger to me as far as I knew. I had no idea what led her to leave that review. I had no thought of the consequences of canceling her. It just felt fun, being casually cruel to someone who had said mean things about a bar I liked. Everyone was having a really good time ripping her to shreds. Me included.

And this isn’t OK with me, this joy in harming other people. It’s become so normalized, and such a firm part of our new political landscape, that I’m afraid I will be CANCELED for even suggesting that CANCELLATION IS HARMFUL BULLSHIT THAT IS KILLING US—the canceled and the canceler. We talk about boundaries and self-protection, and those things are important in intimate relationships, especially if we are being abused. However… I am wondering when talking about politics with strangers, or even with family, who disagree with us became the equivalent of abuse. It needn’t be, if we would stop trying to shame each other constantly.

Isn’t it possible to just be curious about someone, even someone who claims to wish us harm (they almost never actually do; they—and we—are angry and feel powerless so we use words to harm, thinking somehow words are less harmful and “not that bad” and the wounded person is just a snowflake), and wonder why? What made them feel so desperate to claim to want to hurt other people? What made them so desperate that they wanted to vote for someone like Trump? Is it hate? Sure. But what’s behind it?

So instead of writing something accusatory and demanding “my people” navel-gaze and change, I am writing something personal, on my blog that no one reads; so that I know I am speaking about myself, my values, what my SOUL can and can’t support from my own behavior. I’m canceling myself. Here I go.

Speaking of soul, here’s something I’ve never admitted outside a Confessional—the reason I returned to my childhood Catholic Church during Trump’s first term. I told people I did this because I was in so much despair over the election, or because I noticed they had a big LGBTQ+ Welcome banner out front (still the Hippie Catholic Church in town, gotta love it), but really, it was because of shame. I was so ashamed that I had participated in the destruction of this person (and this was LONG before her destruction’s final end) that I needed to confess and do penance. If you know me, you will know that I must have felt some SEVERE remorse. I’m an atheist, after all.

I’m not going back to the Church this time, because part of leaving shame behind is becoming brave enough to tell the truth about my beliefs and actions to everyone, not just to a priest (as a side note, this experience convinced me that modern Catholicism when not conservative and dogma-obsessed is actually a very compassionate religion because it allows people to confront and resolve their shame in a ritualized way instead of telling people they are irrevocably doomed to Hellfire…).

I want to tell another, shorter story, because I think the story of my remorse over shaming K isn’t that controversial. I think most people involved realize now that she was mentally ill and hopefully rue their participation at least a little. But around the same time, I participated in another online dogpile.

This one was against a local kid, probably not even 19 yet, who had been recruited to be the new drummer for a pretty prominent local pop punk band. This guy was new to the scene, just out of high school. He was Mexican-American and still lived with his parents. And he got the fuck canceled out of him. The band had to kick him out or face being banned from all the local clubs that host that type of music. He was branded an ENEMY of LGBTQ+ people and he was wiped off the face of the local scene.

His crime? He posted a clip from Maury Povitch or some shit in which a grandfather was confronted for the first time by his trans grandkid. He had no idea the teen was trans. He reacted poorly. The local drummer commented something like 'I would hate for my abuelo to find this shit out on live TV.'

Was it a dumb thing to post? A dumb thing to write? I guess. To the best of my recollection, I’m not even sure there was an overt insult against LGBTQ+ folks in it. It may have been a comment on the cruelty of muckraking talk shows. He was barely out of high school and maybe not a very eloquent person. Also, there are CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS here that I don’t think I need to get into. In any case, I now believe that this kid was NOT being intentionally insulting and if he was, maybe if someone had fucking sat down and spoken to him about why LGBTQ+ people are deserving of respect and love, he might have gotten a better understanding of why people were angry. But no one did that, that I’m aware of. Because actually conversing with the person you’re canceling is WAY too difficult. It’s very important to be 100% right and 100% inflexible. And here I thought that shit– being 100% right and 100% inflexible–was the provenance of Evangelicals and high school football coaches.

I never met the kid. Maybe he actually was a transphobic dickhead. Guess what—he is a stranger who has zero effect on my life. It’s a bummer, but as long as they don’t have the power to make their bad opinions into policy, people have a right to their bad opinions (waits for the sky to fall in after expressing such a bad opinion). Unfortunately, a whole lot of people with similar bad opinions elect leaders who shape or mirror those opinions. Guess what else—Shaming those voters is NEVER GOING TO MAKE THEM CHANGE THEIR MINDS. It will make them double down. Is that not obvious yet?

So there you go. I have twice been able to see the effects of public shaming I participated in. I’ve done plenty more of it outside of anything posted by members of my local community, and I will never know if my words really hurt someone. I would love to think that these days, one is just immune to anonymous internet cruelty. But I’m not immune, so why should anyone else be? I run from these arguments and turn off notifications about the posts I’ve commented on because I am hurt by words all the time and I am too chickenshit to deal with cruel replies to my cruel replies.

Engaging in anonymous online argument is so fucking cowardly. I know because I am a coward.

Lately when I do it, I have gone back and deleted the comments nearly every time. I can’t support my own casual cruelty anymore. I can’t support my own shaming behavior anymore. It’s hurting ME.

When I say I refuse to shame people, that doesn’t mean I refuse to engage anymore when I see an injustice. It doesn’t mean I refuse to protest. It doesn’t mean I refuse to speak truth to power. Those things should never involve shaming, anyway. And if you argue in good faith, shaming should never enter into it. Shaming is for people who are incapable of or just exhausted by argument. Shaming is for people who rely on cruelty rather than a good argument.

It also doesn’t mean I refuse to commit SATIRE. Those frogs in Portland—that’s satire. Clownvis Presley is satire. The intention isn’t to shame, the intention is to deflect and deflate, to release the tension of rage on both sides. Don’t you feel silly pointing a gun at a frog? If not… well, that’s on you, I guess. A frog is a happy creature. Satire doesn’t shut people down. If it’s good satire, it makes people question the reality of their intractable beliefs. And good satire NEVER punches down. Shaming pretty much always does.

I know, I know, where does Trump fit into this? Luckily, I will never meet him, and if I did, I would let loose with hellish cruelty because he absolutely deserves it. PUNCHING UP is totally permissible, but it’s also kind of useless, because people like Trump can’t be shamed, they can only be outmaneuvered.

I do know that continuing to heap insults and shame upon his voters, the ones I thought I was better than, isn’t going to do shit to change them, or to help me. I firmly believe that we got here in part because of decades of cultural shaming of working people by elites, accompanied by the systematic removal of resources and assistance. And I was a part of that, even as a student, because I got a college education, and am therefore, in at least one way, probably the only significant way, elite; and I have used that status to make other people feel less-than-me.

Those people happen to be, mostly, white people with bad politics—as in, politics that hurt people, including themselves. But they are still people with needs that haven’t been and aren’t being met, with a flawed understanding of what is responsible for this deprivation. I am ready to own that I am NOT in fact, better, even if my political opinions are objectively more moral and ethical (I believe they are, but that doesn’t make ME “better”); and I’m ready to do better. I think it’s part of my recovery.

On the final page of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Jon Ronson writes,

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, more conservative age.

Demanding that everyone I encounter online, even people I know absolutely NOTHING about, people who have and can possibly have zero effect on my life, conform perfectly to my individual moral system is fundamentalist behavior, the kind of thing I’ve always opposed. Punishing average, everyday strangers whose beliefs don’t match mine and have zero effect on me if I scroll past without reading; demanding they be exactly like me or face the rod; is the ultimate in conformity. I won’t do it anymore.