My twitter feed is virtually an echo chamber these days. At first I became angry at the levels of on-line hate and gradually became tired of it, if not totally immune to it. But occasionally I leave my echo chamber and am reminded why I invented one in the first place.
Take the tweet that appears at the head of this blog. An anonymous – of course he’s anonymous – bully addresses a young man who has autism. The young man loves trains (so do I), he dances (I don’t) and has a cat (I have three). And ‘British Patriot’ threatens him and his cat.
The young man is now too scared to go to his window, never mind go out. He is scared for himself, he is scared for his cat. You don’t need to be autistic to be scared but I would imagine it doesn’t help matters.
I do not know why people like ‘British Patriot’ behave like this. It isn’t big and it isn’t clever. He might be a seven-foot tall bullet-headed, tattooed hard man for all I know, in which case it would not take much to stomp the young man’s cat to death. A real man wouldn’t talk or act like that, but then, perhaps British Patriot doesn’t act like a real man. Real men don’t threaten people they know are far less able to defend themselves. Only social inadequates do that.
On today, of all days, we need to remember who we are and why we have the freedoms we enjoy. Those brave men and women, whom we commemorate on the 75th anniversary of VE day, are the real heroes, they are the real patriots. They stood up to the Nazi foe and didn’t blink. They were, as we say, the best of us. British Patriot is the worst of us, threatening a vulnerable person who probably never harmed anyone.
(Footnote: many people have informed the police about the threats made by British Patriot.)
