Being a Jerk in Public Should Not Get You Fired From A Job…..But This is Where We Are Now

You have undoubtedly heard stories like this many times:

16 year old kid goes to Whataburger at 2AM with some friends.

He is wearing a MAGA hat.

While eating and minding his own business, some guy walks over, swipes the hat off the kid’s head, and throw a drink in his face.

This was all captured on video, because this is 2018 and we are in a viral age.

If you have not seen it yet, here is the link: https://twitter.com/brxpug/status/1014417257945018368?s=19

And of course, also filed in the “this is 2018” category, the gentleman who did this was identified by people online, his employer was contacted, and he was swiftly fired.

As I said, this is not new.

There are numerous examples of incidents like this followed by the person behind it having his or her identity revealed.

That New York City attorney who went on a lengthy tirade against immigrants is probably the most famous one of these stories that had emerged thus far.

Let’s get this out of the way: What this gentleman at the Whataburger didwas both disgusting and wrong.

This man accosted somebody for no other reason than the hat he was wearing and then proceeded to assault a 16 year old kid.

I can see the argument for his employer during him for this even though it had nothing to do with his job because he not only attacked another person, he did it to an underage child.

That said, shouldn’t we start asking ourselves if this trend of outing people and getting them fired from jobs in general is a good idea?

The extreme example of this was Justine Sacco, a PR executive who made a silly and somewhat racist joke on her Twitter and the mob viciously went after her and ruined her to the point where it took her years to bounce back professionally.

Assaulting somebody is one thing, but making a stupid joke, sauing something inflammatory on social media, and even making a dumb comment at a restaurant or something are being treated as excuses to dig into people’s lives and destroy them.

And now more than ever, seems people are having a hard differentiating between genuine political disagreement and simply branding anything you don’t like as somehow worthy of banishing somebody from the human race.

I am not so sure this is a good idea.

In fact, I know it isn’t.

Because EVERYBODY has opinions or has done something that others are going go find unacceptable, so who really gets to decide here?

The mob?

Maybe you think that is ok because you are not capable of saying or doing anything worthy of this type of mob reaction.

But you are.

And whether you know it or not, if this. continues, it will only a matter of time before those pitchforks end up at your doorstep, too.