” The game is still out there. It’s either play or get played. ” – Omar – “The Wire.”
I’ve been told I am not nice. I’ve been told I say things in my blog that are not kind.
Guilty as charged. I am neither kind nor nice. But, I am one thing, honest.
If you had known me in my much younger days, you would have seen a much different person. I was a person who put up with a lot of nonsense for the sake of getting along with people. I remember a person telling me one time that I really “knew how to say things so as not to offend people.” I believe they used the words, “politically correct.” If you told me that now I would probably laugh and wonder what I was doing wrong. I might actually be insulted.
I’ve changed. The world has changed. And nice isn’t going to cut it any more. Nice is for the garden club. The PTA. And that’s the problem. So many of us think we can get things done the way we used to, polite political discourse back and forth, consensus, trust.
We are up against people who gave that up decades ago. It’s like the British fighting the colonists in the Revolutionary War. They followed rules. They formed lines and fought how they did in traditional war. The colonists fought from behind rocks and trees. They didn’t line up in an orderly fashion. They didn’t play by the rules. The revolutionaries won.
So, nice is gone. The rules are gone.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t cut people slack. I don’t needlessly pick on people. I don’t “dox” people. I do copy and paste emails from public officials when it is deserved. I do call out public officials when they hide from us and are not transparent. If they are rude and dismissive, I’m going to write about it. It’s called accountability. And it is what we should have been doing all along. They are called “public” officials for a reason. We are the public and we pay their salaries and they work for us.
If all they want is nice then perhaps they should find another line of work, one where they make their own way with a job in private business or a business of their own.
Otherwise, nice is out the window. I’ll be honest, I promise you that. I’ll base my opinions on evidence and what is happening. You, the reader, get the choice. You get to think for yourself and decide if what I say makes sense or not. But nice is not the goal.
And, just a word of warning. If any of these public officials promote the vaccination of children by coercing their parents or without parental consent…well, let’s just say that I’m going to fight that with all of my being.
And that definitely won’t be nice. Or even civil. So all you public officials, better pull up your big girl panties.
