Have We Become Knee- Jerk America?

If you look at my Facebook page, you’ll see a lot of headlines to which you might have a knee-jerk reaction.

I did.

In a lot of cases, those reactions are righteous outrage.

We fume at the audacity of authority figures who abuse their authority, and it’s right. We feel heartbreak at the plight of those abused by authority figures and the capitalistic system that too often makes them the targets of authority figures. And we feel disgust for the politicians whose opinions don’t align with our own.

In other and not so rare cases, we would be well advised to rethink our knee jerk reactions.

I recently read a story on Medium from the perspective of a young man who was attempting to point out society’s failure to teach our children (especially boys) how to accept rejection gracefully, and not see it as the end of their world.

The author was calling us to action, and asking us to work together to end the “war on women’’, and lessen instances of harassment and violence against them.

Instead of reading deeply enough to understand this, most of the readers misunderstood the author and chewed him out for sounding like he was trying to excuse or justify the actions of stalkers, rapists and other such predators.

This false summation of the author’s well thought out work, is just as reactionary as our knee-jerk reaction to Jason Helton’s article. (Link above). We can do so much better. We…