Just getting a few things out of the way quickly...
I've had only a couple of personal interactions with Curt Schilling. In one of them, he was generous; in the other, gracious (after a bit of initial acrimony). I won't go into detail, because one of the moments was private and the other public enough that it's just old news by now. Which is just to say that I don't have any reasons to dislike Schilling, personally. I know other people who've had different sorts of experiences, and so I wouldn't begin to make any sweeping, bad-guy vs. good-guy sort of generalization about him. I like to think that we could get along quite well, especially if we stuck to baseball and maybe wargaming or something. It's actually sort of amazing how many people you can get along with, if you avoid the wrong subjects. Which most of us do every day, right?
Anyway, Schilling's done some ... shall we say "intemperate" things on social media? I won't rehash them here. If you care, you know what I'm talking about. So let's just say I disagree with him about the sentiment behind the Confederate battle flag, and also about the relevance of comparing Germans in 1939 to Muslims in 2015.
Anyway, Schilling's intemperateness got him temporarily suspended by ESPN, and of course you might imagine (or have already seen) what some of Schilling's detractors said about him. Which led to this nugget of indescribable genius:
It's now taboo to compare Nazis with Islamists, as @gehrig38 is being taught by the SJWs at ESPN. http://t.co/6FU5ajIJ0f
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 25, 2015
OK, I had to look that up. Turns out SJW stands for Social Justice Warrior, and is used by ... let's say rightward-leaning souls to describe people who take to social media and comments sections, etc. in the service of (these souls would say) Political Correctness and whatnot.
Which seems sort of a shame, since being a WARRIOR for social justice seems like it would a good thing, right? Does anybody really want to argue against the general principle?
Probably not. However, the criticism, however hypocritical or misdirected, does contain a kernel of truth. Which is that it really doesn't take much skill or commitment or bravery to rip Schilling a new one on Twitter. Nor does it do more than maybe an eensy-weensy bit of good. Instead, what it does is announce to all your Twitter followers and Facebook friends and Instagram whatevers that you are on the side of Truth, Justice, and the American Way (as preached by Norman Lear, who happens to be one of my heroes).
What good it does, though? Really hard to say. But you wanna see a WARRIOR for social justice? Someone who doesn't separate the world into Usses and Thems, but rather considers everybody, however misguided they might seem, as fellow human beings worthy of some respect? Listen to this podcast, or read this book or this article, and then see if you still think of yourself as a warrior. Instead of just a lowly clerk well behind the front lines.
I'll admit that I'm well out of the mainstream here, by which I mean most of my friends. I do think Political Correctness has gotten out of hand, but a) people have been saying that for decades, and b) I'm sure there are plenty of people who would accuse me of Political Correctness. Everything's relative, we all fall along a continuum, yada yada yada. It's just that I'm in a different place than many, and probably most, of the people who share my general beliefs and preferences. Which is often frustrating for me.
There is, of course, a middle ground. There's always a middle ground. I was reminded of this by Kelefa Sanneh's recent piece in The New Yorker, which I've now read twice because it made me rethink some things. It's a subscriber-only story, but here's the passage that really gave me pause:
Speech nuts, like gun nuts, have amassed plenty of arguments, but they—we—are driven, too, by a shared sensibility that can seem irrational by European standards. And, just as good-faith gun-rights advocates don’t pretend that every gun owner is a third-generation hunter, free-speech advocates need not pretend that every provocative utterance is a valuable contribution to a robust debate, or that it is impossible to make any distinctions between various kinds of speech. In the case of online harassment, that instinctive preference for “free speech” may already be shaping the kinds of discussions we have, possibly by discouraging the participation of women, racial and sexual minorities, and anyone else likely to be singled out for ad-hominem abuse. Some kinds of free speech really can be harmful, and people who want to defend it anyway should be willing to say so.
Yes, now we're straying into First Amendment territory, which is just tangentially related to Schilling's suspension and his vilication in certain quarters of social media. I'm just giving you a little tour through my brain here. My point is that I've been pretty far along the Speech Nut Continuum, and lately I'm maybe not quite so far along.
My real point is that hammering Schilling for his (to you and me, cockeyed if not necessarily dangerous) beliefs is easy, but probably not all that productive. What's more, it's simply unfair to suggest that because he believes things you don't, and is willing to commit them to the everlasting Internet, he's then by definition an awful person.
Imagine for a moment that you were publicly judged by the worst things you've ever done. All I'm asking of my friends is that they imagine that. Only then, if you've got the time and the stomach for it, go be a real warrior.
