Homer-Vacula · @HomerVacula
22nd Aug 2012 from Twitlonger
Please RT? - The end. I'm sure you won't have been expecting this, but this is the end-game for me. For this account. This is the destination I had in mind when I picked up this ugly mirror and held it in front of all of us; Turned to some more than others, admittedly. Here we are. Intellectuals. Rational Thinkers. Skeptics. Atheists. People who strive to look past their baser instincts even in the face of disagreement.
This is what we've become. And this is what we've lost: The high road. The fundamentalists. The practitioners of magical thinking. The deluded and the deceitful. They're watching us and gleefully laughing as we attack one another. Or in many cases just get attacked by our own. As we implode, they laugh.
Look at Amy Davis Roth. Look at what you've done to her. From what I can see, the worst offense she committed was to belong to Skepchick, to cry and express her hurt to someone she felt hurt her. This earned her ad hominem attacks, campaigns to somehow harm her business and a level of childish taunting that I haven't seen since, well, grade school. Look around you. You did this. You skewered one of your own and barbecued her in front of each other.
Rational? Angry. Intellectual? Knee-jerk. Proud? Not so much any more. Once I called all of you my friends, my people, because I had this notion in my mind that you were 'better'. That you, as a whole, were worthy of my un-flinching belief in your shared goals and intelligence. But that's not the truth, it turns out. The truth is hideous and savage. The truth is, you're dully, and sadly, meprerely representative of any other large group of humans. You're awful.
We're a sad, tattered, loosely, if that, confederated people who share many common goals, but can't seem to share a common space. We're animals, and I do mean animals in the pejorative sense. Docile creatures in the middle surrounded on all sides by wolves, our own wolves, with a few of the docile who've decided to challenge the wolves. The wolves have bared their teeth and now, instead of facing outwards to our foes, they've turned inwards to quell the dociles who spoke up. Blood was shed. Blood that can never be returned from whence it came. Staining the ground, indelible this stain will not rub away.
Some of you have either started turning around or begun turning your backs on the more egregious bullies. The aggressive, spiteful and rage-fueled. Some of you haven't. Real bullies. Not #FTBullies who might write an unkind word or ban you from their blog. Real bullies. Including the one I first came here to hold a mirror to, @elevatorgate. He is a clear and obvious representation of all the worst in us. He is our shame made solid. Our secret desire to dominate and put a foot on the neck of.
And we should be ashamed. Ashamed that we, the intellectual, the rational thinkers… that we cannot get along any better than a pack of feral dogs. That we champion our shame instead of overcome it. That we, despite all our tall words and burnished sentiments, we attack our own over petty things, or over shameful failings of our character.
We should be ashamed. I'm not a #FTBully or a #FTanything. I'm nto a Skepchick. I'm not even someone you've probably even heard of. And, frankly and clearly, I'm not a part of this 'movement' any more. Good luck. You desperately need it.