"The Lord Will Handle Your Bullshit"

A man in a town up the road left this on one of my posts last night:

"Punk. You sound like a decent guy for a minute. Better leave good people alone or the Lord will handle your bullshit."

Read it twice. "Better leave good people alone — or." That one word does all the work. Or. It's the hinge that turns a sentence into a warning. And I'm not the only one who read it that way — a total stranger saw the same comment and wrote underneath it: "that sounds like a threat for sure."

This is the new style of threat

Nobody types "I'm going to hurt you" anymore. That leaves a record. So you get the deniable version instead. "The Lord will handle you." "Something's coming for you." "People like you don't last." Vague enough to walk back in the daylight, pointed enough to land at night. A threat with an alibi.

The part I can't get past

I am where I am — on bond, watched, every word I say a potential exhibit — in large part because of things I said out loud, in public, online. I've been told, by people with real power over my life, that I should just get offline. That if I weren't online, none of this would be happening to me. That my being here is the provocation.

So somebody explain this to me.

If being online is the danger — if my speech is what's reckless — then what is that? What is a grown man telling me to "leave good people alone, or" face what he says God has coming for me? If the rule is that you go online, you speak, and you own the consequences — fine. Then that rule covers him too. And if it doesn't — if he gets to say it and it's "just words" — then why doesn't that same grace ever reach me?

You don't get it both ways. Either online speech is serious and we hold it to a standard — in which case "the Lord will handle your bullshit" gets measured by that standard too. Or it's just noise nobody should take to heart — in which case stop telling me that mine is a crime.

That's the whole trick. The standard slides depending on who's talking. When I speak, it's evidence. When they speak, it's nothing.

Now watch what I'm not going to do

I'm not going to post this man's address. I'm not posting where he works, where his kids go to school, his birthday, or his phone number. People send me that kind of thing all day. I'm not going to use it, and I'm not going to ask a single one of you to go find him or swarm his page.

Why? Because that — the pile-on, the crowd turned loose on one person — is exactly the thing being done to me. It's the thing I've spent a year putting on the record. I am not going to become it to win a fight with a stranger who left a nasty comment.

That's the only difference that has ever mattered. I aim at the behavior. They aim at the person.

I'll keep putting these on the record — the words, dated, in public — because a record is protection. But I'll keep doing it the way I've always said it should be done: out loud, with my name on it, pointed at what was said and never at someone's life.

If that's what makes me the dangerous one, then we're living in a world I genuinely don't recognize. LOL. Except not one bit of it is funny.