Get a Grip

Several years ago I knew a woman, the manager of an office, who would occasionally remind her workers to “get a grip.” She meant that she couldn’t discuss a problem or issue with them until they could calm down and approach the subject rationally. This tendency to fly off the handle about trivial matters or about things we have no control over is a good indicator of a temporary failure of perspective.

This is what comes to mind when I read about threats from strangers. It’s likely that the person mailing bombs to leading Democrats was just a crazy person motivated by some kind of warped sense of their role in politics. That may also apply to the man in Pennsylvania who threatened to shoot up a polling center on Election Day after finding out he wasn’t registered to vote or to the man in Florida who threatened to blow up an elections office building because he was fed up with receiving too many robocalls. I wouldn’t call these folks typical.

 But there have also been some recent examples of people, who are probably otherwise fairly levelheaded, who needed to be reminded to get a grip.

The first example comes from northern Indiana. On the day before Halloween, a “9-year-old girl and her twin 6-year-old brothers were struck and killed by a pickup truck as they crossed a road to board a school bus.” It was a tragic and heartbreaking accident that made national news. The driver of the pickup truck has been charged with three counts of reckless homicide and one of passing a school bus causing injury.

Only a couple of days afterward the sheriff was forced to go on Facebook and local television to ask people in the community to stop threatening the woman, saying, "No good can come from the harassment and the threats of violence against individuals involved.” What made those people think threatening this person was a good idea or that it would have positive results? It was obviously more than one person.

In a similar situation at about the same time, professional football player Ty Montgomery and his family were receiving threats. Why? He made a mistake during a football game. Instead of taking a touchback in the end zone after a kickoff in the fourth quarter, he tried to return the kick. He was hit, fumbled and lost the ball, blowing an opportunity for his team to make a last effort to win the game.

You don’t have to look any further than the last word of the last sentence - game! And this again was obviously more than one person. He told the press, "People are sending messages to my wife, people are making comments on posts about my son. I'm getting phone calls, people offering their houses to stay [at] because apparently people are making threats online."

There are a lot of benefits to the current level of technology, allowing mass communications and giving anyone the ability to contact others instantly anywhere in the world. Through social media we can pass along good news or amusing pictures and stories to groups at a time. One downside of the same technology is this ability to express outrage, often in the form of threats. These threats serve no purpose, accomplishing nothing, except possibly making the perpetrators feel a little better about themselves. What’s worse is that it can be over something as trivial as a sporting event.

Maybe everyone needs a sign over their television and computer screen reminding them, when the awful news or the awful sports decision is broadcast, to “get a grip.”