Cellphones ruin social discourse
Pat Beall’s column about the sickening influence of antisocial media on all of us, starting with kids texting on their phones, is dead on (“Social media is teaching us to hate ourselves, and each other,” Sept. 21). I commented years ago that the day cell carriers agreed on “unlimited texting” was the beginning of the end of civil discourse, because people will type stuff they would never say face to face or on the phone, voice to voice.
At least in person you can see and hear the pain your dark words convey, and you can’t do it anonymously, the preferred weapon of the coward. Plus, you may pay a price right then and there for your verbal bravado … the medium policing itself.
I wish the Feds would attach a five-cent tariff on every single text message, all phones, all carriers, all the time. Within a year they could pay off the national debt…and get people actually talking to each other again.
D.J. Fone Palm Bay
Jan. 6 proves GOP isn’t blameless
I find it ironic that that a recent letter-writer stated the Democratic Party has become the party of evil after ”inciting violence” after the Kirk killing (“Hate speech from the left incites violence,” Sept. 19). What does that make the Republican Party after the riots trying to overcome the election results?
Les Fisher Kissimmee
Hortman, Kirk slayings have guns in common
In June of this year, a member of the Minnesota legislature was killed along with her husband and two other legislators were wounded by a man who reportedly had a hit list of Democrats he wanted to kill. There was little outcry from the nation that the rhetoric needed to be toned down.
Now a right-wing commentator, Charlie Kirk, has been killed and the outcry that the “left” has got to stop with the negative rhetoric is being amplified.
Both of these instances are the results of runaway gun violence in this country. Can we use this moment, when a young man is cut down in the prime of his life for his political philosophy, to finally do something about gun violence? Will the members of Congress on both sides of the aisle please come together and enact some legislation that will help to reduce this out-of-control situation with guns?
There are too many guns in the hands of those who obtain and use them illegally, use them recklessly or use them for revenge or road rage. These acts of violence happen because it is too easy to get a gun in this country. The idea that every person — man, woman and child — needs to have a gun is ludicrous. This is not what the founding fathers of this country envisioned.
Val Mobley Orlando
Kimmel was a business decision
What I believe happened to Jimmy Kimmel was that ABC realized, finally, that late-night programming was a fiscal liability and decided to change. His recent commentary merely provided additional negativity and thusly Kimmel was suspended. Affiliate TV companies reacted to the commentary, canceling programming and stretching the fiscal issues further. There was no government edict canceling a foul-mouthed Kimmel; in short, it was a self-inflicted action culminating in the business decision to stop money losses.
Bob Kring DeBary
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