WASHINGTON — Today I want to talk about "talking" -- as in political discourse.
There's been a lot of this week except I'm not sure you can call it "disclosure."
President Joe Biden: "...a cancer that would put them in a flag-draped coffin. I know...."
Lauren Boebert/R-Colorado: "You put them there----13 of them."
President Joe Biden: "One of those soldiers was my son, Major Beau Biden."
That was President Bien paying tribute to U.S. troops and being heckled by a member of Congress.
Boebert is not the first to do this and almost certainly won't be the last. But, if you don't think elected lawmakers set a tone and an example, here's what happened to one of our local teenagers. 18-year-old Hanan O'Looney, a student member of the Montgomery County School Board.
Watch:
After voicing her opinion about mask policies last week, she was cyberbullied -- including by at least one comment that she should harm herself.
Adults in Montgomery County have quit their jobs after being targets of online racism and hate.
Now, it's happening to a teenager.
We can not let ourselves become immune. That hate will seep out from those posts and slowly infect more people until this awfulness becomes normal.
Hana herself has a solution.
"When you start dehumanizing the opposition, then it becomes much more difficult to have productive discourse, and just more difficult to come to a solution that could make more people happy. So I encourage people to think critically about how they're communicating and what the best way to get their message across is because I can almost guarantee but it's not best done through personal insult," she said.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
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