Vim & Vigor or Vinegar & Piss?

It's obvious that I have a lot of anger towards other people that I consider to be morons. (Another reason why it is such a bummer that I do not speak Yiddish. A book review in yesterday's New York Times notes, "Yiddish parses the stupidity of others in a thousand ways, and find distinctions matter." Damn, that makes me laugh and beam with pride. This shit is in my genes, even if I don't speak the mama loshen - mother tongue.) Something happened yesterday that made me rethink some of my rants.

My friend Logan is a certified sex educator, completing her PhD in Human Sexuality at NYU. She has worked with hundreds of New York City school kids, covering the full range of the socio-economic spectrum, and wrote an awesome book about how to talk to kids about sex. A few nights ago, she was on TV discussing birth control. Her honesty about what kids are up to these days and her frank approach to helping kids make safe, rationale decisions about sex caught the attention of a conservative blogger. Needless to say, the kuneh-laiml didn't agree with her and took it upon himself to launch a written assault on Logan's character. His minions chimed in, and reading their nasty attacks literally made me ill. (I'm not going to link to him because if people click through and he tracks referring links, I have no doubt that I will get hateful comments, and I don't want to deal with these shmendriks.) Later, Logan received an email from a yold who ranted about how he can't wait to meet her in person because she's a horrible person and he's going to sue her for sharing her ideas that result from the fact that her parents don't love her. He ended his misspelled and grammatically incorrect missive by noting that he didn't "need a college degree to make him dumb." (Obviously not.)

At first, I felt morally superior to conservatives because I don't write such vile personal attacks on my bl.. oh wait. I do. Maybe I am not better than these judgmental douche pipes who confuse "having morals" for "being a shithead." While I am pretty certain that I've never gone as far as these right-wingers do in character assassination, I still call them names. (Sometimes even in Yiddish.) On the other hand, I've never sent anyone an email threatening to sue them because I think their ideas are stupid, and certainly not insulting their children. Hmmmm....