I don’t like when celebrities are ‘caught’ saying deplorable things in a heated moment. Sometimes they say really awful things, specifically about observables such as race, weight, sex, nationality, odor, etc. Plenty of people have done it. I won’t mention the names or link to any particulars here.

My problem isn’t that I wish celebrities had better behavior – although I do. My problem is with the entire fallout of how we’re all supposed to take the celebrity seriously when they were enraged. When people get angry they say things that are designed to hurt others.   People will say things that they don’t mean or wouldn’t normally say. And it’s not like they are betraying some unspoken belief that they’ve hidden. Angry people often say wicked things for the sole purpose of hurting someone else’s feelings. In the moment, the offender tries hard to communicate disrespect – not due to a lack of respect – but due to how it will make the other person feel.

I find the entire circumstance weird. If someone is boiling over and saying patently ridiculous things to me and calling me names, then I have a very hard time taking them seriously. All the same, context matters and words can hurt. It’s weird that we know that people can say untrue things in order to hurt us, and then it actually hurts us. Strange.

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