The other night, I watched a Bravo \u201cReal Housewives\u201d reunion show in which a woman yelled through a bullhorn \u201cYou’re a dumb ho! Shut up!\u201d at another woman two feet away. A split-second later, this woman (the one with the bullhorn) looked genuinely surprised when the other woman (the alleged dumb ho) charged at her, furious, and began swinging.<\/p>\n
It was one of the strangest moments of television I\u2019ve ever watched, and not just for the more cartoonish reasons: the bullhorn, the hair-pulling, the fact that these women were wearing expensive ready-for-TV dresses and gowns and yet were saying and doing vile things that undermined any beauty they\u2019d mustered. No, I\u2019m desensitized to the nastiness; as a married man who wants to stay <\/em>married, Bravo must remain pulsing and seething on at least one television in my house at all times, lest I give my wife an excuse to turn off my weekend football marathons in the fall. It\u2019s a seesaw of TV torture.<\/p>\n Anyway, the moment was actually bizarre for another reason: the shock. I watched this and I wondered: Have we become so disconnected from reality by our easy and safe Internet vitriol that we no longer imagine people reacting in real time when we say something truly hateful and hurtful?<\/p>\n This woman\u2014the one who shouted \u201cYou\u2019re a dumb ho\u201d into a bullhorn, remember\u2014was shocked <\/em>that her words had caused someone to leap into action, shocked that she was now being attacked\u2026she\u2019d literally used a bullhorn (a fact I can\u2019t emphasize enough) to shout expletives into another woman\u2019s face\u2026they were an arm\u2019s length apart\u2026and yet there was this \u201cwhy is she charging at me?\u201d look on her face. Had she really expected she could insult someone so dramatically (again: bullhorn<\/em>) without suffering any consequences?<\/p>\n I really don\u2019t want to admit that anything Housewives-related is representative of our larger culture (you\u2019ve got to believe me; it kills me to write this), but this moment felt much bigger than the Housewives, something much more expansive, something I see almost daily now: an ever-heightening level of anger and outrage and unchecked vitriol (usually expressed online), with a corresponding decline in our levels of self-awareness about what we\u2019ve said. The important thing, many people think, is that we said the words, see, that we \u201cgot that off our chest,\u201d or that we \u201ctold that person off,\u201d or that we \u201cmade that joke,\u201d or whatever. Often, our mean-spirited commentary is capped off by the awful expression, \u201cJust sayin\u2019,\u201d the polite equivalent of a mobster saying \u201cIt\u2019s just business, nothing personal,\u201d before putting a bullet in someone’s brain.<\/p>\n We want to say the thing, but we don\u2019t want to concern ourselves with the consequences of the saying. We\u2019re, like, just sayin\u2019, you know? It is as if we are tossing pennies into a bottomless pit, and we get to walk away without hearing the final plunk of copper on the cave floor.<\/p>\n This, of course, is why online outrage is so popular. On news sites, the comment boards ask us for our thoughts on breaking stories, and we quickly pollute the space with terrifying hateful rhetoric. Not just about important issues, but about everything<\/em>, the release date for the new Spider-Man <\/em>movie, the cast of the new Star Wars <\/em>movie, the draft position of a football player. We summon our fury, and we scream in all-caps. We watch angry TV commentators argue, also hear them on the road as we drive, and we remain angry all day. Angry on message boards, angry on Facebook, angry on Twitter. On Yelp, we take out our anger on servers who make the slightest of mistakes, on restaurants that fail to achieve constant perfection. We rate the beers we drink, the bathrooms we visit, the amount of sunshine on a particular afternoon. On RateMyProfessor, my students have for years been registering their displeasure over the fact that\u2014in my writing courses\u2014I make them write. Some of them are furious. Some of them hate <\/em>me. Everywhere we go, someone or something is asking us to rate our experience, to tell our horror stories, to let the mean spirits loose.<\/p>\n And so much of what we say is written under the veil of usernames, or is written in places and spaces that guarantee we won\u2019t need to worry about reactions. Even on most television shows, the worst remarks are said via video-conference, or in those \u201ctestimonial\u201d-style videos wherein a solitary Housewife speaks her mind to the camera. All of us: We speak our anger in safe forums, but there is no corresponding app to hold us accountable for what we\u2019ve said, or to ask others to rate our value as human beings.<\/p>\n Our nation\u2019s love affair with outrage isn\u2019t a new development, obviously. The new development is how little regard we now pay to the consequences of our speech. We have become so enamored of our right to say whatever we want <\/em>that we are shocked when someone reacts in non-virtual ways, when (for instance) someone we like is fired by their employer for offensive speech, or when a business is spurned by consumers after a CEO says something awful. We\u2019ve wished the \u201cright to free speech\u201d into the \u201cright to consequence-free <\/em>speech.\u201d<\/p>\n