When Did Inflicting Violence on Strangers Become So Accepted?
By: Rachael Hope
Tags: Justice, Digital, Gun Control, Social Media, Violence

I was so incredibly angry when I saw the responses to John’s post. I broke my cardinal rule of never reading/responding to the comments because I saw people I care about under attack. I tried to report the worst of the comments in hopes that Facebook would remove them. Unfortunately, you can’t reason with unreasonable people. When someone shows up for the sole purpose of attacking, there’s no talking them down.

When you threaten someone, their well being, their livelihood, their family, you are inflicting violence whether you’re using actions or words.

No matter how much I see it, I’m at a loss knowing people feel completely okay inflicting such verbal violence on other humans over a difference of opinion. Violence isn’t just physical. Words have meaning, and weight, and using your words to berate a stranger because you like having guns is reprehensible. When you threaten someone, their well being, their livelihood, their family, you are inflicting violence whether you’re using actions or words.

In her article, Words Can Change Your Brain, Therese Borchard explains:

…hostile language can disrupt specific genes that play a key part in the production of neurochemicals that protect us from stress. Humans are hardwired to worry — part of our primal brains protecting us from threats to our survival — so our thoughts naturally go here first… …a single negative word can increase the activity in our amygdala (the fear center of the brain). This releases dozens of stress-producing hormones and neurotransmitters, which in turn interrupts our brains’ functioning. (This is especially with regard to logic, reason, and language.) “Angry words send alarm messages through the brain, and they partially shut down the logic-and-reasoning centers located in the frontal lobes,” write Newberg and Waldman.

It’s easy to say you were just talking, that you didn’t actually do anything, but that’s a sorry excuse, and I don’t believe you believe it. If people are going to use words that cause other people real damage, it’s time to start owning up to it.

When you say cruel, threatening things to someone, whether it’s to their face or written down, you are doing them real harm.

The reality is, human brains are wired to change depending on the kinds of words they hear, the environments they experience. When you say cruel, threatening things to someone, whether it’s to their face or written down, you are doing them real harm.

In fact, just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions. [1] You’ll disrupt your sleep, your appetite, and your ability to experience long-term happiness and satisfaction. Psychology Today

When we were young, we were taught the mantras I’m like rubber, you’re like glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you and sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. That’s great in theory, but as Lisa Feldman Barrett points out in the New York Times, it’s just not that simple.

But scientifically speaking, it’s not that simple. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain. That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.

This kind of perfunctory ferocity is not something we should just be accepting as a fact of life. There was a time when it was possible to separate your digital life from your “real” life in the physical world, but that time has long passed. The people we connect with online are real people, with real families, real feelings, and complex lives.