Jailed By a Snowflake

As of the writing of this article, I am in Facebook jail for twenty four hours. Now, before you defend the actions of Facebook and give me hate for violating the terms of service, allow me to explain the situation to you. Furthermore, while I will be justifying my cause, I have accepted the consequences for my actions and want to make this article about a deeper social issue: Taking offense for the wrong reasons.

You should know that I am not one who is easily triggered. I generally let things roll off my back, choosing rather to go the peaceful route in debates and arguments. However, there are two things I do not tolerate; a person who looks down on others for their religious beliefs and a person who refuses to open up their mind in a debate, choosing instead to believe that they are right and could not in a million years possibly be wrong. I ran into a person who did both of these things in a comment thread for a post in the Facebook group Aspiring Authors United. For privacy reasons I will call him Sebastian.

Now, Sebastian had made a comment to a post from someone who had asked “Are there any Facebook groups that do not have so many fantasy writers in it? All I see are posts for books with dumb witches and curses.” I paraphrased that, of course, but that was essentially the meaning he was getting at. Sebastian decided to comment about how he is tired of seeing people who claim to be real witches and actually believe that spells are real, and proceeded to call those people “delusional wack-jobs”. I myself am a Wiccan, and I felt the need to defend my beliefs. I told him about how bigoted and closed minded he is for saying those who practice Wicca are delusional, when I have myself performed spells that did produce results. Long story short, he continued to argue with me about why Wicca was not real and why I, personally, was a delusional wack-job.

I ended up replying to him with very colorful language, because he kept trying to tell me why my beliefs were wrong when all I myself was trying to do was explain why it was wrong for him to claim Wiccans are delusional and crazy, people who live in their own fantasies, people who have low IQs and are not smart. Those are all things that he had said about witches. And yet, because of the language that I used, I was put in Facebook jail for bullying. I find it funny that Sebastian got off scott free when he was the one that was bullying me, and committing hate speech against witches. I even reported his comments and nothing happened. You can believe what you want about the situation, whether I was in the right or the wrong regarding it. It doesn’t matter if I was wrong for saying what I did, because the situation inspired me to speak out on a different matter: The idea of offense and how we handle it.

The term snowflake refers to someone that easily gets offended over things, many times small and seemingly insignificant things, and people who can’t accept when someone disagrees with him or her. Sebastian was a snowflake, and I paid the price because Facebook only looks at the post in question, and does not regard the posts of everyone involved, or look into why certain things were said. And I want to point out a few things about the idea of getting offended about things in general, not just the more specific "snowflake" category.

Why do we take offense at certain things? Obviously there are many answers to that question, but I think at the core it is because we as humans hate to feel discredited, or appear dumb, or seem to others as stupid. Now of course that is justified offense...if someone is attacking you in a condescending way then of course, take offense. Which is exactly what I did with Sebastian; he chose to be hateful towards me for my beliefs so I lashed out in offense. He, however, was getting offended for no reason. I simply told him why he was wrong to call us Wiccans delusional and crazy wack-jobs. In fact, when he brought up his beliefs in science, I agreed with him. I told him that I believe fully in scientific theory, I believe in the big bang, I believe in all of his science stuff. I LOVE SCIENCE! But! I also informed him that I have experienced Wicca for myself, and it is very real for me, and it is real for the millions of other witches who practice it, so I told him that I believe in both. Yet he was so offended still for some reason that he could not let the topic of Wicca being false go. And that is when I lashed out with some, in hindsight, very strong word choices.

This article is not so that you can pick or choose a side, so please if you comment on this when I am allowed to post on Facebook again, please don’t mention who you think was in the right or not. I simply wanted to share all of this so I could get you all to hopefully be a little more understanding of others and their beliefs. Don’t let your own personal beliefs dictate how you treat other human beings as people. It’s okay to disagree with someone for their beliefs. Just, if you are debating a topic with them, discredit their ideas and not them as a human. Every human regardless of beliefs or way of life deserves to be treated with respect. So be offended, but only in the right context, and always respect other humans as people….how you treat their ideas is a different story. Don’t be a snowflake. I love you all and I especially want to thank the supporters of my Facebook page, Vocal Stories to Inspire.

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