In the musical “Hamilton,” Alexander Hamilton sings about writing his way out — of the tragic storm on his childhood home of Nevis, an act that would set him on a course for New York and destiny, and later out of scandal.
That’s the good thing about being a writer — maybe the bad thing, too — you can write your way out of almost anything but especially tumult as you try to make sense of the irrational.
This week, I was verbally attacked by two people. The first was par for the course, a workplace oversight that blew up.
The second incident involved a man who went off on me in a conversation about President Donald J. Trump. I had pointed out that people were afraid of being attacked — not just primaried in the case of politicians or given a thumbs down on social media but being verbally and physically assaulted and having their families endure the same. As if to prove the rightness of what I’m saying, this person then went after me in a deeply personal way.
It’s part and parcel of the abysmally vicious moment in which we find ourselves. And while I’ve had liberals cancel me over pronouns and listened to a conservative cousin relate how a priest, a priest, reamed her out for being a Trump supporter, I have to say that no one can do vicious like the current American government. I remember that Novak Djokovic, the tennis star now in the twilight of his career, once said that NATO bombed his native Serbia, because it could do so. And that’s exactly it: People do what they do, even visiting violence on others, because they have the power to do it.
Listen to a Republican representative calling PBS “garbage” at a Congressional hearing. Watch the members of the Trump Administration Signal chat group denounce Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic editor in chief and PBS “Washington Week” moderator who was accidentally copied into the group’s Yemen attack plan, as a lying loser. But here is something that somehow really upset me even more. Watch Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene go off on a British Sky News reporter who is trying to ask a question.
Whatever happened to — forget kindness — civility, politeness? President Barack Obama deported so many migrants that he was known as the Deporter in Chief. Yet you never saw shaved heads, chains and perp walks in his administration. Maybe the deported Venezuelans are gang members. Maybe some are not. I don’t know. But isn’t it worth sorting it out? Whatever happened to due process? Why do you have to parade people like that?
You make a mistake, why not own it, fix it and move on? Why denounce the guy whom you unwittingly made a party of the mistake, as in the case of the Signal chat group?
You want to cut government waste, so why aren’t you sitting down with the (now removed) inspectors general and auditing each department?
Here’s what being attacked is like: It rattles you. It threatens you. It makes you feel unsafe.
Journalists have always gotten hate mail. It goes with the territory. (When I was a young reporter, I had a stalker who used to correct my grammar by mail. Bet that was a first.)
But the attacks we get online nowadays are more scurrilous and downright defamatory, which is odd because one of the ways the Trump Administration silences critics is by threatening defamation.
Back to my male verbal attacker, I wonder if he would’ve gone after me if I had had a husband, or if I weren’t a strong, opinionated woman. I don’t know and I don’t care. No one has a right to assail your integrity, that is your wholeness as a human being, any more than one nation has a right to assault the sovereignty of another.
I once had a friend who went off on me for bringing up a work situation too many times — my bad. I tried to keep the friendship going to no avail. Months later, I pocket-dialed her. She, not realizing this, nonetheless got back to me pleasantly and told me to call her back. I never did.
“To err is human. to forgiven divine,” the 17th-century poet Alexander Pope wrote. We are in the season of Lent, the season of forgiveness but also the season that reminds us through the Passion of Jesus of the cruelty that the powerful can visit on those who oppose them.
I wish harm to no one. But I think each person also has the right to be let alone.