You meet a lot of different people on social media. Some are nuts. Some are dangerous.

You meet a lot of different people on social media. There’s a lot of crazy-pants stuff one can mostly tolerate (not always) but the racists & nationalists are outright scary. They just want to kill people, especially if you’re Black or Muslim. Some remind me of the rightwing guys I used to work with who hated my politics & were always trying to threaten me. I could write a book on the poses they strike to intimidate. A favorite is sticking out their pot bellies, trying to make them look like barrel chests, & looking down their noses at you with a Clint Eastwood sneer. You have to try not to laugh & you can’t look scared. And sometimes when you answer them, you poke them in the belly to make sure they think you might be deranged & do them in.

They were afraid of Black guys even though they hated them cause physical size matters to small-minded bigot-brains & in that regard the men had little difference. Since I’m only 5’2″ they thought it would be a walk in the park to make me cower in fear. But even little women, especially pissed off ones, can back them off if they’re aren’t carrying clubs cause a lot of them are weasels at heart, afraid of their own shadows & who think everyone’s out to get them.

Threatening them with bodily harm worked (“I have seven brothers & they’ll break every bone in your body…”). Threatening them with legal action worked better. Both were empty threats but they didn’t know that. Smarts is seldom their strong point. Hatred is. Got called a lot of names & accused of unseemly sexual acts with Blacks for pay. But you don’t blush & you certainly don’t explain; you come out slugging even if you’re only packing empty threats. Attitude counts.

It was many years of hard-scrabble training for social media. So when someone on Twitter or Facebook calls me a jihadist or “a habitual placard holder from Minnesota” it’s just chump stuff. If I see their walls are filled with irrational venom & hatred toward Blacks or Muslims, I just block their ugly asses & all the scatological & simian images, bloody scenes involving animal sacrifice & child brides. It’s like finding yourself in a psycho house of horrors & it’s pogrom mentality.

They need to be smartened up but words aren’t meaningful to them. Power is.