Article in brief: The author shares an experience and tries to send the message that everyone should be allowed to have freedom of speech.
Everyone wants to be heard, and everyone has different opinions. It’s only natural that opinions differ, but some people refuse to comprehend that.
People get ever so consumed in what they believe is right and forget how to differentiate between reality and the thoughts that are produced in their heads. They are willing to break people apart and throw a bunch of hurtful words towards anyone who goes against them. I’ve been a victim of that ridiculous act twice in the past month and let me tell you, that experience was anything but pleasant. I expressed a thought and stated my opinion in the form of a tweet, and someone on twitter called me ignorant and idiotic for the sole purpose of thinking differently.
I was being attacked! Those words were completely unnecessary, even though the person didn’t agree on something that doesn’t give them the complete right to demean my opinion and insult me. I didn’t have a chance to be rational with that person because I was bombarded with tweet after tweet. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, was I supposed to defend myself or ignore the misconceptions of a bigot? I then gave up and decided to let it go because if a person wasn’t prepared to be civil and calm then I simply refuse to waste my time trying to get through them.
What upsets me the most is that the person was actually willing to get into a heated argument just to prove that they were right and that I was wrong. It’s saddening how many people fail to have composed arguments. I felt like what I had to say didn’t matter at all, I felt like I lost my voice.
Then again, Twitter is a social network that only allows 140 characters per tweet and tweets are shortened, and as such often are misunderstood. However, people must make an effort in pertaining a positive message through that tweet and not misinterpret it in a negative way.
Lately, it has become extremely common to witness a ‘twitter fight’ every single day and over some mundane topics that don’t affect humanity in a positive way in any manner whatsoever. You see some vulgar language and people taking sides and attempting to shoot down the other party due a mere disagreement over let’s say which team had better game play that night! How insensible is that?
They refuse to acknowledge that people have the right to be heard, that they can express themselves freely without the fear of being attacked. It’s a tad frustrating how someone has to over think their every move just to avoid the intense drama that may come their way. People need to accept that with different souls come different minds. We should avoid all the hate and cussing over something irrelevant and agree to disagree more often.
The first step to making that happen is to actually listen to what the other person has to say and try to think the way they do, you might then realize that their opinion was true and you weren’t well aware of it. The second step is to argue and not fight, there’s a huge difference. Arguing is all about sharing ideas and fighting might as well be changed to being a bigot.
My point is, we should learn to embrace other ideas and allow ourselves to be persuaded a bit instead of holding on to an idea, only then will we learn more and understand that there’s more than our eye can see.
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