Think or Apologize...

I’m sure that we have all heard a comment made by someone that was meant to be funny but turned out to be something quite hurtful.

It may have only been the usage of one word but in the long run it wasn’t funny at all. The person that made the comment may not have realized that they struck a nerve and by the time they figure it out, a lot of damage to friendships may have been done. So now it’s time for them to say, “I’m sorry for my comment. It didn’t come out right that’s for sure. I hope you understand and accept my apology.”

Now some people never forgive and the icy cold shoulder could end in a frostbitten friendship. Others realize that their friendship is stronger than foot in mouth disease and can forgive a lame brain comment.

In the good old days a person had to hear the comment of a ‘friend’ like, “Did you hear what Dale said last night about (you, your best friend, or family member)?” By the time Dale hears about the fiasco, it may be a fate worse than death and he will obviously need to mend the proverbial fence and quickly.

Nowadays we not only have the in person comments we also have email, texting, Facebook and Twitter to contend with and I can tell you there are a lot of comments that are made that go viral over the Internet for everyone to see, not just the person of interest.

It’s amazing how a keyboard or a cell phone can change everybody’s thought process towards an individual who either is sending out a message in the heat of the moment or aren’t proofreading what was written.

So everyone is angry about the message writer and of course once they find out an apology soon follows. “I’m sorry for yesterday’s Tweet about _____. I can see how insensitive the message was and please forgive me because I certainly didn’t mean it to be hurtful!” Okay, I didn’t do all of the @ # and abbreviations but the point is we have a means to communicate that is way too often misused.

It seems that many of the people that are misusing Twitter are celebrities and sports athletes. Of those athletes, a large majority are in the off season thinking no one is paying attention.

I for one think that communication is valuable for relationships, informing the public and having a positive message to grasp onto.

When it becomes detrimental to an individual’s life it becomes similar to bullying, which we all know cannot be tolerated.

Who educates these athletes about their public comments on Twitter? The problem as I see it is through mobile messaging a thought comes to someone and they react before they actually think. It doesn’t matter if they are on the town having a few drinks or partying with friends or just watching TV at home if the message that goes out is not appropriate then someone spoke without thinking about the consequences and that’s something that is difficult to forgive. It seems that these messages are happening more and more often.

It is hard to imagine that any team owner receives any enjoyment seeing a stupid statement making headlines in the newspaper or on the Internet but banning the use of social media is also out of the question.

So maybe the word needs to get out that in order to save face on a day-to-day basis it would be far more beneficial to think before using social media because you look foolish whenever you need to apologize for something that should never have been said in the first place.