We live in a time of fear

We live in a time of fear. We fear we will be unpopular or outcaste by the majority. We fear for the weather and the raging fires. We fear for our jobs to be eliminated. We fear physical harm. We fear rejection. We fear our own self worth.

This is nothing new. We have lived in fear since time began. There was the fear of dinosaurs and space aliens so we created armies and the Bible.

I’ve written about this subject many times but this weekend brought a new chapter to my backyard. In my little city there were rumors of being invaded by Confederates. Well the sons of the sons of the sons or the maybe some kind of linage to a historical heritage announced they would be coming to town to rally about preservation of monuments to the generals who lost the war. The city turned to panic.

There was some reason for this fear. A month earlier a similar group marched into a small college town in the mountains carrying shields and bats and guns to confront a group of anti-protestors throwing bottles, paint and pepper spray and it proceeded to turn into a ruckus and an unfortunate death.

So our city prepared for the worst possible scenario and brought in troopers and heavy trucks and blocked streets and surrounded all participants with cities finest.

Luckily, this time, it was more of a hot air festival minus the music and the food trucks and civility prevailed.

The media went home without breaking news coverage and our emotions can fester for another day.

Social media is not so lucky. People with whatever opinions will comment with whatever potty mouth or in cogent statement with no recourse.

Bullying is the use of force, threat, or coercion to abuse, intimidate, or aggressively dominate others. The behavior is often repeated and habitual. One essential prerequisite is the perception, by the bully or by others, of an imbalance of social or physical power, which distinguishes bullying from conflict. Behaviors used to assert such domination can include verbal harassment or threat, physical assault or coercion, and such acts may be directed repeatedly towards particular targets. Rationalizations of such behavior sometimes include differences of social class, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, behavior, body language, personality, reputation, lineage, strength, size, or ability.  Bullying done by a group is called mobbing.

Bullying can be defined in many different ways. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has no legal definition of bullying, while some states in the United States have laws against it. Bullying is divided into four basic types of abuse – emotional (sometimes called relational), verbal, physical, and cyber. It typically involves subtle methods of coercion, such as intimidation.

Bullying ranges from one-on-one, individual bullying through to group bullying called mobbing, in which the bully may have one or more “lieutenants” who may seem to be willing to assist the primary bully in his or her bullying activities. Bullying in school and the workplace is also referred to as peer abuse. Robert W. Fuller has analyzed bullying in the context of rankism.

A bullying culture can develop in any context in which humans interact with each other. This includes school, family, the workplace, home, and neighborhoods. In a 2012 study of male adolescent American football players, “the strongest predictor [of bullying] was the perception of whether the most influential male in a player’s life would approve of the bullying behavior”.

Think about what an army does?

Intimidation (also called cowing) is intentional behavior that “would cause a person of ordinary sensibilities” to fear injury or harm. It is not necessary to prove that the behavior was so violent as to cause terror or that the victim was actually frightened.

Threat, criminal threatening (or threatening behavior) is the crime of intentionally or knowingly putting another person in fear of bodily injury. “Threat of harm generally involves a perception of injury...physical or mental damage...act or instance of injury, or a material and detriment or loss to a person.” “A terroristic threat is a crime generally involving a threat to commit violence communicated with the intent to terrorize other.”

“Intimidation” is the name of a criminal offense in several U.S. states.

In human social affairs, discrimination is treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person based on the group, class, or category to which the person is perceived to belong rather than on individual attributes. Based on their actual or perceived membership in a certain group or social category, “in a way that is worse than the way people are usually treated”. It involves the group's initial reaction or interaction going on to influence the individual's actual behavior towards the group leader or the group, restricting members of one group from opportunities or privileges that are available to another group, leading to the exclusion of the individual or entities based on logical or irrational decision making.

Discriminatory traditions, policies, ideas, practices and laws exist in many countries and institutions in every part of the world, including in territories where discrimination is generally looked down. In some places, controversial attempts such as quotas have been used to benefit those believed to be current or past victims of discrimination—but have sometimes been called reverse discrimination. In the US, a government policy known as ‘affirmative action’ was instituted to encourage employers and universities to seek out and accept groups such as African Americans and women, who have been subject to discrimination for a long time.

Propaganda that repeated enough becomes true?

A joke is a display of humor in which words are used within a specific and well-defined narrative structure to make people laugh and not to be taken seriously. It takes the form of a story, usually with dialogue, and ends in a punch line. It is in the punch line that the audience becomes aware that the story contains a second, conflicting meaning. This can be done using a pun or other word play such as irony, a logical incompatibility, nonsense, or other means.

A joke is a short humorous piece of oral literature in which the funniness culminates in the final sentence, called the punch line… In fact, the main condition is that the tension should reach its highest level at the very end. No continuation relieving the tension should be added. As for its being “oral,” it is true that jokes may appear printed, but when further transferred, there is no obligation to reproduce the text verbatim, as in the case of poetry.

It is generally held that jokes benefit from brevity, containing no more detail than is needed to set the scene for the punch line at the end. In the case of riddle jokes or one-liners the setting is implicitly understood, leaving only the dialogue and punch line to be verbalized. However, subverting these and other common guidelines can also be a source of humor -- the shaggy dog story is in a class of its own as an anti-joke; although presenting as a joke, it contains a long drawn-out narrative of time, place and character, rambles through many pointless inclusions and finally fails to deliver a punch line. Jokes are a form of humor, but not all humor is a joke. Some humorous forms, which are not verbal jokes, are: involuntary humor, situational humor, practical jokes, slapstick and anecdotes.

They are told in both private and public settings; a single person tells a joke to his friend in the natural flow of conversation, or a set of jokes is told to a group as part of scripted entertainment. Jokes are also passed along in written form or, more recently, through the Internet.

Stand-up comics, comedians and slapstick work with comic timing, precision and rhythm in their performance, were relying as much on actions as on the verbal punch line to evoke laughter. This distinction has been formulated in the popular saying “A comic says funny things; a comedian says things funny”.

Offensive to some while maybe the freedom of speech?

Slander as an oral defamation, in which someone tells one or more persons an untruth about another, which untruth will harm the reputation of the person defamed. Slander is a civil wrong (tort) and can be the basis for a lawsuit. Damages (payoff for worth) for slander may be limited to actual (special) damages. Malicious intent are usually difficult to specify and harder to prove. Some statements, such as an untrue accusation of having committed a crime, having a loathsome disease or being unable to perform one's occupation, are treated as slander per se since the harm and malice are obvious and therefore usually result in general and even punitive damage recovery by the person harmed. Words spoken over the air on television or radio are treated as libel (written defamation) and not slander on the theory that broadcasting reaches a large audience as much as if not more than printed publications.

Yet our fear might not be able to understand or comprehend the difference?

Defamation of character occurs when someone makes a false statement about you that causes you some type of harm. The statement must be published (meaning some third party must have heard it), false, and it must result in harm, usually to the reputation. Those essential components of a defamation claim are fairly straightforward. But what kinds of harm can result from a defamatory statement, and can you recover damages for those harms in a lawsuit?

Accusations can bring harm to a reputation?

The most obvious negative consequence that a defamatory statement can cause is harm to your professional reputation. Perhaps you are a local businessperson and someone made a statement about you to others indicating that you did something dishonest. Such allegations might cause your customers to take their business elsewhere. Perhaps the statement caused your employer to doubt whether you should remain employed. Those are clear-cut examples of harm to your reputation in your professional community.

When harm is presumed it still has results?

Some kinds of statements are automatically presumed to be defamatory. The recent Duke lacrosse scandal is definitely an example of that. There, a woman accused several young athletes of raping her at a party. It turned out that her account was not trustworthy, but the damage to those young men was profound. Any statement accusing another person of sexual misconduct, or of having a sexually transmitted disease, is “per se defamatory,” meaning that it will be presumed to constitute defamation if, in fact, it was false and maliciously or recklessly made.

Accusing someone of committing a crime can harm one’s personal or professional reputation.  An accusation of criminal conduct also is presumed to be defamatory. 

Similarly, an allegation that someone is racist or is otherwise prejudice likely will be presumed to be defamatory because it can cause strong reactions in the community. It is important to bear in mind, though, that expressions of opinion about you, even if they are negative, are not defamatory. Opinions are protected speech. Likewise, if someone relates an embarrassing incident involving you that is also not defamatory because embarrassment does not rise to the level of a defamatory statement and if the statement is true, your lawsuit will be barred.

Or bring in the lawyers?

Of course, financial consequences often go hand-in-hand with harm to reputation. If you lose some business or lose your job altogether, you could seek compensation for those financial losses. If you lose business opportunities and can tie that to the defamatory statements, that is also a form of financial harm for which you can seek recovery. If you incur expenses as a result of taking steps to repair your reputation, you may include those losses in a defamation lawsuit.

Bring in the doctors?

Another type of harm suffered by victims of defamation may well be health problems, ranging from insomnia, to depression and anxiety, to physical ailments.  Enduring someone’s publication of a false statement about you can take a toll on your mental and physical health, and those harms may be compensable.

Here comes the judge?

In many jurisdictions, if you can prove that someone made a false statement about you knowingly or recklessly, and published it to other parties, you have established a claim of defamation and it will be presumed that you have suffered harm. If, however, your jurisdiction does not follow that rule, or if you are a public figure or official who is in the public eye (someone who more routinely faces negative statements), you may have to prove you were in fact harmed by the defamatory statement. 

In order to establish that your reputation has suffered, in addition to your own testimony, you would need to provide witnesses who could testify that that effect. You could produce evidence that you lost your job, that you were demoted or passed over for a promotion, or suffered other adverse consequences that can be tied to the defamatory statement.

To prove financial harm, you could testify about the monetary effects of the defamation, but you may also need other documentation, such as bank statements, bills, or tax returns, to back up your claims.

To prove mental or physical anguish, you would testify about the severe effects the defamation has had on you. You would also need to provide lay witnesses, such as a spouse, a relative, and/or a close friend, to testify about the noticeable changes in you as a result of the incident. However, you most likely would also need your doctor or other treatment provider to testify about your treatment, if you have had any. You would need to show that any mental health or physical health consequences indeed resulted from the defamatory statement and were not pre-existing. If they were, your doctor would need to explain how the defamatory statement worsened your condition. You would also want to provide medical bills to show what the treatment cost you out of pocket.

If the opposing party is likely to claim that your reputation was already poor, or that whatever problems you are claiming to suffer from now weren’t caused by the alleged defamation, you will need to anticipate that and provide witnesses who can counter those arguments.

Remember that someone expressing a negative opinion about you, or even relating an embarrassing anecdote about you, is not the same as making a false and defamatory statement. To understand the nuances of defamation, you may want to consult with an experienced personal injury lawyer, who can tell you whether you have solid legal grounds to file a defamation lawsuit.

Truth be told, we are not very nice to each other. We have created words so hideous that they cannot be used in a newscast but can be constantly chanted in music. If there is enough of ‘us’ and fewer of ‘them’ we create all sorts of atrocities in the name of whatever cause will support the behavior.