“A gentle answer quiets anger, but a harsh one stirs it up.” – Proverbs 15:1
We live in a time and a society dominated by social media and as a result, is more concerned with their image than the individual, with making a scene and impression rather than considering the individual, and shaming rather than educating.
Case in point: I was on Twitter, which is not for the weak, and there was a tweet about the A$AP Rocky situation and how he wasn’t interested in thanking Trump for his release. And the general sentiments of the thread were that people agreed with him. I, knowing very little about the situation, retweeted that if Trump had something to do with how A$AP was able to return to the United States, then he ought to give gratitude where it is due. I should not have posted that because instantly, people were commenting on my post and retweeting it illuminating my ignorance, jumping down my throat about how little I knew, etc.
I did not claim to know everything, let alone anything about the situation and even prefaced my whole statement by saying if, which was a signifier that I wasn’t entirely aware of the details of how he was released. But, instead of taking the opportunity to educate me or kindly, point out the flaws in my statement, people commented on how ignorant I was and laughed.
The issue here is not my ignorance, which I was transparent about, but that where there was an opportunity for enlightenment – to educate me on a subject I didn’t know much about- but it turned into me being shamed and judged. We have become a society that listens to correct, not to genuinely listen to or hear what the person before us is trying to say. The issue is not just what they said, but how they said it. People speak truths all the time and even though they’re right, the impact and importance of those truths can all be lost because of a condescending , dispassionate or an overall wrong tone for the message. Knowledge is said to be power, but the power is in what we do with that knowledge and how we choose to convey it.
Too often we focus on the importance of our message to be said, that we leave little regard for our delivery. We’ve all heard the saying it’s not what you say it, it’s how you say it, which is another way to paraphrase the scripture above. If someone had corrected me, instead of judging me, then I would’ve been fully receptive to that, but that didn’t happen. The truth can be hard to hear no matter how we deliver it ,but when we are spoken to and not at, when we know the heart of the person in front of us, it makes the pill a little easier to swallow.
