“Aiyoh! Did you see what she posted on Facebook?”
And so Amara began pounding out a furious reply to her friend’s recent post, all while spewing her unwanted opinions at her hapless friends.
It didn’t matter what the subject was. Everything offended Amara. From the way the government dictated the colour of school textbooks, to the less-than-jubilant way that the waiter greeted her. From religion to race to politics to morals to laws to childrearing to filial piety to entertainment to blogs, Amara was always offended by something.
If it stopped there, it would be enough. But Amara never stopped. She would latch on to a topic like an unstoppable leech until everyone there was 100% convinced of her opinions – or gave up the discussion. Fortunately, Amara took silence to mean consent, when it actually meant that she had been unfriended, blocked, and completely excised out of their lives.
Amara meant well, for sure. It was just such a terrible way of meaning well. Her friends had long since given up trying to talk her out of it. What was the point of trying to reason with tiring, mindless anger? But it did take a toll on her friendships. Not that she noticed her dwindling social circle – she was far too busy advocating the next social cause, or in some cases, shooting it down.
Her sensibilities were so refined, so cultured, so aggravatingly narrow-minded that it was nearly impossible to navigate the confines of her politically correct world view.
As she had posted once on Twitter, “All discussion and comments are valid. Yours and mine. So get off your high horse and let’s start debating like adults.”
Her smirk at a well composed Tweet disappeared when minutes later, she received another response.
“@amaracomments telling someone to “get off their high horse” implies that you think their opinions are invalid. Therefore this makes your own
@amaracomments comment invalid, and also, you should get off your own high horse, don’t you think?”
Her fury could not be contained.
Swiftly she unleashed a torrent of didactic comments upon her responder, telling him in excruciatingly specific ways why his argument was a fallacy, and why she was absolutely correct, and why her responder had to come around to her way of thinking or be doomed to a lifetime of idiocy.
After his two Tweets to Amara, there was no other reply. No other Tweet, even.
A week, then a month passed.
Normally, Amara would have taken his silence to mean consent. But with a barrage on the scale that she had fired upon him, she would have expected some measure of acknowledgement.
There was none, and it was killing her.
Amara stalked her responder’s account, determined to get a response. His handle was a mysterious @quietmysteries. No name, no location, no other nick online existed. His precious few Tweets had all been RTs of news articles relating to free speech. His followers seemed to be spambots (and herself, of course), and he only followed officially validated news sources.
Who was this person? Why did he not reply her? If he was even male, that is.
Her friends were nonetheless pleased, though. Amara’s obsession with @quietmysteries meant she had less time to pursue other causes with her usual dogged determination. She felt less obliged to push her stand onto others with her near obsessive monitoring of the silent @quietmysteries.
Her friends begin meeting up with her more often. She regained long lost contacts who were pleasantly surprised that she had mellowed. A gentleman even asked her out on a date!
But Amara had to find out who @quietmysteries was. Slowly, she worked her way into the tech circles, the tech industries. She had to get into Twitter, be part of their staff. And when she did, she found out all she could about @quietmysteries.
An email address. silentsecretsofthemindandsoul@yahoo.co.uk
Nothing else.
Even as Amara got married, she worked her way into Yahoo, in her quest to discover who was the person who replied her. Her Twitter account lay fallow as she focused her efforts on her marriage and the person who had offended her delicate little sensibilities.
Pregnancy came with many differing opinions on how one should raise their child. Ordinarily, Amara would have been terribly angry at the notion that confinement was a silly, outdated practice.
But she saw what her colleagues meant about the time spent going through confinement, that it could be channelled to something more productive.. And she chose to let it go, so that she could focus on finding out who silentsecretsofthemindandsoul@yahoo.co.uk was.
After her second child, she got into Yahoo. Her family migrated to UK to work. And there, Amara found a decisively fake ID (221B Butterbeer Baker Street, really?).
That was it. Her trail had gone cold.
She had spent the better part of her life searching for the person who had dared oppose her and ignore her, who had hurt her delicate little sensibilities and refused to atone for his mistakes, who had been a goal in life.
What would she have said, if she ever met him? Did she even feel that strongly about free speech any more?
“And so, though our delicate little sensibilities might be offended, let us ask ourselves this question. Are we truly upset that our rights have been trodden upon?
Or do we take offense because there is an untapped well of frustrated energy within each of us that needs to go somewhere, anywhere?
Think about it the next time you’re about to reply harshly to something you don’t agree with.” said Amara, at a TEDTalk.
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