When will we be outraged at the outrage?

There will come a time — and I hope it is soon — when the outrage mob will be neutered. It will eventually happen. It is only a matter of time until we reach a tipping point. It will start with one company or personality and the rest will follow.

To start with, even just the term “outrage mob” is a misnomer. It is never a real live mob, it is almost always some self-righteous virtue-signaling person sitting in mom’s basement firing off a tweet or an email to the offending company or getting an activist organization to do their bidding for them.

There are countless cases, but the most recent is Bed Bath & Beyond pulling their black jack-o’-lanterns off the shelf because they are controversial. You would think this was done to appease hordes of people outraged that such a product was sullying the intended spirit of the holiday. Well, you would be wrong.

A couple of the offensive jack-o’-lanterns were displayed outside the law offices of Feerick, Nugent and MacCarthy in South Nyack, N.Y. A partner at the law firm said, “We understand that someone complained about them and so once we got word of that we immediately took them down.”

The person complaining thought they could be construed as racist blackface. The law firm followed up with the Bed Bath & Beyond store and they promptly removed them from their shelves. The most important takeaway from this incident is that it was a “person.” Not a horde, not a mob, but one person, no doubt with an ear and an eye out for anything, however slight, that can be taken as an attack on his or her sensibilities.

And on cue the requisite activist organization eagerly steps in to lend credibility to an insolent, whiny child. In this case it was Wilbur Aldridge from the NAACP who jumped in and said that the black jack-o’-lanterns showed an “extreme lack of sensitivity.” Just to remind everyone again, we are talking about a Halloween decoration for a holiday whose primary colors are black and orange. So just to be clear, the pregnant nun costume is OK, the mask with the massive bleeding head wound is OK, but the black jack-o’-lantern is just plain tasteless and offensive and mustn’t be tolerated.

How is it possible that a team of lawyers and a national retailer are bowing to the demands not of an actual pitchfork-wielding mob, but of a single person who wildly misconstrued their decor?

We are at a point where an adult in the room needs to take control of the situation and tell them, “If you don’t like it, tough! Now go back down to the cellar and play Fortnite, the adults are talking!”

The adults in the room that need to take control are the more visible people or companies that continue to cave to the slightest bullying. There needs to be a movement of pushback against the hyper-offended and polite but gentle refusal to acknowledge these increasingly absurd offenses.

Once one high-profile company or personality publicly takes on these bullies, others will see that the water really isn’t that bad and they can all start jumping in. Once a handful fight back, the floodgates will open and the outrage “mob” can finally bite their tongues and move along.

---

Philippe Jussaume is a resident of Dunstable. Follow him on twitter @pjussaume and on instagram at philippejussaume.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/36eeuDM