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I sat on the porch with my grandfather, watching the rain hit the pavement. He was scrolling through his phone\u2014a new habit he\u2019d picked up\u2014when he suddenly stopped and frowned.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy do people do this?\u201d he asked, tilting the screen toward me. It was a comment section on a news article. Strangers were tearing each other apart, insulting appearance, intelligence, and character over a simple difference of opinion.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just the internet, Grandpa,\u201d I shrugged. \u201cPeople say whatever they want because they\u2019re anonymous.\u201d<\/p>\n
He shook his head slowly, setting the phone down as if it were heavy. \u201cYou know,\u201d he started, looking out at the rain, \u201cwhen I was your age, we had disagreements. Plenty of them. But we didn\u2019t have a screen to hide behind. If you had something nasty to say to a man, you had to look him in the eye to say it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He leaned back in his chair. \u201cAnd you know what happened? You realized that half the time, it wasn\u2019t worth saying. You saw the other person was just a human being, tired and trying their best, same as you. We learned the discipline of silence. We learned that if you couldn\u2019t offer kindness, you offered nothing at all. That wasn\u2019t weakness; it was dignity.\u201d<\/p>\n
He picked up the phone again, looking at the angry comments one last time before turning the screen off.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s easy to be cruel when you don\u2019t have to watch the light go out of someone\u2019s eyes,\u201d he said quietly. \u201cBut just because you\u00a0can<\/i>\u00a0say it, doesn\u2019t mean you should. Your character isn\u2019t defined by what you do when everyone is watching\u2014it\u2019s defined by what you type when you think no one knows who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked at my own phone, thinking about the comment I had almost posted earlier that day. I deleted it.<\/p>\n
Some things are better left unsaid.<\/p>\n
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I sat on the porch with my grandfather, watching the rain hit the pavement. He was scrolling through his phone\u2014a new habit he\u2019d picked up\u2014when he suddenly stopped and … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1598"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1600,"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions\/1600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dynenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}