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PO Box 3201
Martinsville, VA 24115
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Stephen H. Provost is an author of paranormal adventures and historical non-fiction. “Memortality” is his debut novel on Pace Press, set for release Feb. 1, 2017.
An editor and columnist with more than 30 years of experience as a journalist, he has written on subjects as diverse as history, religion, politics and language and has served as an editor for fiction and non-fiction projects. His book “Fresno Growing Up,” a history of Fresno, California, during the postwar years, is available on Craven Street Books. His next non-fiction work, “Highway 99: The History of California’s Main Street,” is scheduled for release in June.
For the past two years, the editor has served as managing editor for an award-winning weekly, The Cambrian, and is also a columnist for The Tribune in San Luis Obispo.
He lives on the California coast with his wife, stepson and cats Tyrion Fluffybutt and Allie Twinkletail.
Ruminations and provocations.
Filtering by Tag: bullying
What causes perfectionism? Why do some people strive for unachievable goals, setting themselves up for failure? Maybe it's because they've already been told they're failures so often they feel the need to prove their critics wrong. Or maybe they're scared to death those critics are right.
Read MoreESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith was emphatic: “Jon Gruden’s career is over. It’s over.” But then he said something I found simply unbelievable: “I cannot imagine even a white male with influence and connections and some degree of power that can overcome what The New York Times reported and what we all now know.”
Read MoreYou don’t just sit back in your lifeboat when the other side is drilling holes in it. Most likely, you’ll try to stop them; at the very least you start bailing water like your life depends on it (because it does). Either way, you don’t compromise. You don’t say, “All right, old chap, why don’t you just punch four holes in the hull instead of eight, and we’ll call it even.”
Read MoreDonald Trump refuses to just go away and let us live our lives in peace. His chaos has left us in a continual state of anxiety that metastasized into trauma. … We want that trauma to end. If Trump just retired to a quiet life at Mar-a-Lago and played golf every day for the rest of his life, we might not feel that justice was done, but at least we might be able to start feeling safe again. … I just want him to leave us the hell alone.
Read MoreThe internet depersonalizes our interactions and, in doing so, keeps us from seeing people as human beings. Instead, we see them as targets or obstacles or followers. As in war, this reinforces the “us vs. them” mentality that fuels continued hostility and conflict. Peace and understanding? They’re condemned as compromise and disloyalty.
Read MoreDon’t call me a social justice warrior.
I like Warriors – as long as they’re named Stephen Curry or Klay Thompson, and they’re draining 3s in the name of Golden State. But real war (off the basketball court) is hell, as the saying goes, and it’s a warrior’s job to win. Period. Which usually involves making someone else’s life hell.
Count me out.
I’m not interested in making anyone’s life hell. But we, as a society, seem increasingly inclined to do so – and that worries me. Thanks to the internet, shaming has become a spectator sport, with self-proclaimed social justice warriors on the lookout for people to condemn.
In a way, they remind me of those highway patrol officers who hide behind billboards, waiting to take off after the next driver who’s going a few miles over the speed limit.
Except they’re worse.
Those roadside cops may be sneaky, but they have an official mandate to stop people from speeding. If you’re exceeding the posted speed limit, they’re perfectly within their rights to pull you over. In fact, they’re doing their job.
Social justice warriors don’t wear badges, haven’t gone through any training and lack any official mandate to do what they do. They are, in a sense, vigilantes, patrolling the social scene and trying to shame people into “doing the right thing” – according to their definition.
“Hold on,” you may object. “Don’t they speak out forcefully against racist and sexist behavior, discrimination against the LGBT community and others. Isn’t that ‘the right thing’?”
Of course it is. But speaking out is one thing, shaming is quite another.
Shaming has been used as a means of social control throughout history, often in ways that today’s social justice warriors would find offensive. People have been shamed for refusing to believe in “the one true faith” – whatever their culture determines that faith to be. They’ve been shamed for the color of their skin, for menstruating, for their sexual orientation. Even today, many people who call themselves social justice warriors decry such actions as “slut shaming” and “body shaming.”
As they should.
But if you’re so quick to condemn others for shaming – a form of bullying – should you really be so eager to use the same tactic? Do the ends truly justify (pun intended, again) the means?
Before answering that, perhaps we should address what those ends will actually be. People who are shamed wind up being condemned, ostracized and often dehumanized. Branded with scarlet letters, they become convenient scapegoats for public rage and symbols for “everything that’s wrong with the world.” They can lose their reputations, their jobs and worse.
Does it change their minds? It’s doubtful. Shaming is ineffective for the same reason torture is: If someone is hurt badly enough, s/he will say anything to make the pain stop. Recanting when you’re tied to a stake is meaningless; contracts signed at the point of a gun are null and void – for good reason.
Others may be bullied into remaining silent – or going into hiding – because of the example that’s set by public shaming. But is that really a good thing? If we tell them to shut up, we’ve cut off any avenue for dialogue that just might change their minds about a whole range of issues. Perhaps, heaven forbid, the people we were tempted to shame might even teach us a thing or two.
Too often, social justice warriors remind me of Patriot Act proponents: willing to curtail freedoms (in this case, freedom of expression) for the sake of, supposedly, preserving them.
That’s not to say we should start looking the other way when someone uses the “N” word, condemns someone for his/her sexual orientation or harasses another person, sexually or otherwise. What we should do, I believe, is condemn the behavior without shaming the person. None of this is, nor should it be, personal. If we make it so, we expose our own ulterior motives.
Are we really trying to make the world a better place, or are we just voyeur vigilantes, actively seeking out people to mock and shame because we enjoy seeing a good train wreck? Or, worse, because we want to prop up our own fragile egos by claiming some sense of superiority? If it’s the latter, we’re merely sinking to the level of those we shame – or lower.
Language matters. There’s an important difference between a social justice warrior and a peaceful protester.
Saying you’re a warrior makes it sound like you’re ready to kick some ass, and to hell with anyone who stands in your way. Saying you’re a diplomat makes you sound like a wimp or, at the very least, someone who’s willing to “compromise your principles” – because compromise has become a dirty word in the modern lexicon.
And that’s too bad, because a willingness to compromise fosters trust, and trust is necessary for dialogue. That’s what I want.
So, call me a diplomat. A proponent of peace. An advocate for equality. A believer in kindness. I’ll take any of those as a high compliment. But please don’t call me a social justice warrior. I have no interest in starting a war; I want to pave the way for peace.
