Trolls, Haters, Anti-Abortion or Pro-Choice Fanatics, And Shame

I never had an experience with an anti-abortion fanatic until Sunday. He was as sneaky as the sneakiest of a racist troll. This mofo used my blog and my last post for his agenda platform, and that post didn't didn't mention a damn thing about abortion. To add insult, he then essentially told me not to believe my lying eyes and that I wasn't reading his words right.

I am one given to introspection. Some of his points were very thought-provoking, and when I cool off, I will mull over them some more. Oh, I deleted them in my last post - there were so many - because they grew increasingly offensive and made wild and incorrect assumptions about me, my kid, and my past abortion, but I did save the emails.

The reason? We can sometimes learn something from people who are extremists and piss us off royally, once we sift through their garbage.

Here's the formula for the more intelligent hater or troll. They have at least two basic techniques.

One is they set up a blog that has little content. Then they go trolling through blogs with points of view or the type of people they don't like, and they leave comments that mix the truth with lies or covert hate, like racism or sexism.

The other is they set up a blog that has a similar name of a blog that others enjoy. I ran across one last week that I thought was about black humor, and found it on the blogroll of an unsuspecting black blogger we all know and love.

So I got to reading the current post of this blog, and this person cited outrageously high crime stats for black against white crime. He had a link as though that was an authoritative link, so I clicked on on it, and it was to another blog! Not the Department of Justice (DOJ) who has the real crime stats, but to an obscure-looking little blog with a link to PDF format article with those same stats.

I read the cover page and who authored it, and quickly googled the name. Well, well, well. The "foundation" that authored it was founded by a white supremacist who is on the ADL's hate watch list, which includes other supremacists, organizations, and Nazis.

That damned blog had a bunch of links to look like the blogger had done his research, but put a spin on the most mundane of articles, even one by Fox News that was actually more progressive than his.

The thing is, that post had truth mixed in with lies, so if you scanned it without looking for how he justified his point of view or reading the links, you might walk away believing the lies he told. That blogging bitch is either a white racist or worse, a self-hating black person who promotes white supremacy while at the same time, having a blogroll of black bloggers. Wolves in sheep's clothing.

And this is how our heads get polluted, and how we as black people, black men, and black women, get confused and start arguing among one another over how bad things are when often our source of information is propaganda.

The trolls who work at Fixed News may or may not be bloggers, but as far as I'm concerned, Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly are masters at this at technique #2. Two smart men who speak like gentlemen on camera, and mix lies with truth because have contempt hidden in their hearts. Oh, they got outted over a year ago, but skated for a long time under the radar, and for a lot of white folks who live in a bubble and don't understand racism or classism all that well, they still think those guys aren't so bad.

Back to trolls. I view them as obsessive types who like an audience. I think the best remedy is to delete their numerous comments on one post when it becomes apparent that they're not sincere - as in sincerely mis-educated but wanting to learn, or sincerely wanting to do something other than harass the blogger and distract from the post and put a chilling effect on it so that readers think, nah, I don't wanna get into that conversation!

However, there are whites who really don't understand a black point of view (I'm speaking generically), just as there are men who really don't understand a woman's point of view. Yeah, I know a lot of them just fake like they "aren't aware" so they can continue to be offensive and stress out folks, but some really don't know any better and are just giving an opinion that sounds dumb or mean to our ears.

I have a lot of patience with people like this, maybe because I was so incredibly stupid and biased about men when I was much younger and had all kinds of misconceptions about white people. Blame the culture or tv, I'm just sayin'.

I speak of all this now because I've written several posts about my personal experience and regret about an abortion I had at age 19. One out of three women, according to Planned Parenthood, has had one. That's a lot of potential parents who never became parents. Note that I didn't say that's a lot of women. It takes two to tango and don't ever forget the men who share that experience.

Yet despite these abysmal numbers, I can't recall a single blogger or reader-commenter who ever told their story. Ya girl Kit has, though, and for a purpose beyond being an attention whore.

For the record, I've shared my story because I've known and seen too many young women - and men - abort without having a fuckin' clue as to how their emotions might be impacted afterwards. Most folks don't feel too good about it once it's done. Folks might look at you at little funny and start judging you, and this goes for men too, as in, why fuck didn't you use a rubber, or why you dog that girl like that?

Abortion, as a conversational topic, just might be as taboo as incest, and this is the reason why is no one talks about this shit.

The consequences of the secrecy, however, is that youth are left ignorant and clueless about what they're deciding. It's a double-bind situation, because if you do start talking about it, you the run the same risk of being denigrated even when you say you regret it.

Case in point: Yesterday along came this fanatical pro-life bitch who said everything to me short of calling me a baby-killer, all because I remain staunchly pro-choice, and I'll explain that in a moment.

I don't recall too many pro-lifers getting all knotted up and talking shit to men who enlisted and served in the military, which is one of the great killing machines of our times. In fact, they're more likely to vote for the Nuke 'em Party, aka the GOP.

This is where the rabid sexism comes in, and that's as nasty as racism. Well, bullies always did like to pick easy targets - the perceived underclass group in any society, and of course, women.

Despite what I've been through, I have and will forever remain pro-choice and continue to give my opinion. I will not be shamed or bullied into silence by either the fetus-in-the-jar anti-abortion asswipes or the it's-just-a-little-minor-medical-procedure feminist pro-abortion liars.

There's a helluva middle ground, and that's where most people get fucked. Having an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy throws most single folks who grew up in the Me First Generation into a panic. They only have a few weeks to make a decision. During this time, there's an excellent chance they're emotionally numb from shock, mentally on auto-pilot, and trying not to think at all beyond the appointment day.

This is especially true if their boyfriend (or girlfriend), and their other support systems are saying that a baby would be too inconvenient "right now", as though there's ever a good time to have a child.

Or the support system will do the opposite, and say having the baby would be okay even though the woman in particular has a track record of being so irresponsible that you know that kid has a very high chance of becoming totally effed up.

Here's my bottom line advice, and I don't give this kind of advice lightly.

If you are a woman - or a man, 'cause y'all are part of the baby-making process too - you know your temperament better than anyone else.

When stuck in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, make the decision you think you can best live with, not only in the immediate future, but five, ten, twenty and thirty years from now.

Remember that no matter what you decide, there will be times when you wonder what your life would be or have been like had you made the opposite decision.

I know people who regret having a child, and you'll find a lot of them among the elderly, sitting alone or senior citizens homes where they have nothing but time to think, and I know lots of young and middle aged adults who regret aborting or encouraging a woman to have one.

You are not all-powerful and will never, ever know the outcome of whatever decision you didn't make, so again, consider all the advice you get, read up on as much as you can on the health dangers of both pregnancy and abortion-related infertility and other problems, think about the impact of your personal spiritual beliefs (if any), know and respect your temperament, and make the choice you think you can live with.

This, to me, is the heart of real pro-choice: choosing what is right for you after giving it serious thought from all angles. This is exactly what the anti-abortion and the pro-abortion fanatics don't want - thinking about anything other than their point of view which they've rammed down the throats of everyone in the country.

Think for yourselves, and walk not in shame if you think you made a mistake by continuing or terminating a pregnancy, for mistakes are human and help us grow - when we (and sometimes others) allow it.

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I probably won't respond to many comments like I usually do for a couple of days, as I'm leaving the discussion to readers to share their feelings, thoughts or experiences. When not on comment moderation, I will be nearby to delete comments from any known or suspected trolls, flamers, or undercover haters.

If you leave an anonymous comment, please put some kind of name at the end of it as I expect their may be more one, and use that anonymous feature if you aren't comfortable with others knowing your story.