Tom Guarriello reflects on growing up in the Bronx in the 1950s-60s, where kids attacked each other's weaknesses to sort themselves socially. He connects those early lessons about aggression to today's need for civility online and offline, and explains why he leaves hate comments visible rather than deleting them.
So I just want to talk a bit about this, um, this business of hating and of, um, abusing one another here. Uh, I grew up in the Bronx. In the '50s and '60s. And growing up in the Bronx at that time, as I'm sure is not much different today, um, groups of kids needed to find ways to sort ourselves out. And the way we sorted ourselves out was through this group process of seeking weakness in one another and attacking the weaknesses. So everybody of course had a weakness. I was a fat kid. Other kids were stupid. Other kids had one parent. Other kids had dirty clothes. Other kids, you know, it didn't matter. Everybody has a weakness, right? So, uh, our Lord of the Flies kind of society that we developed together, together, was based on determining one another's weaknesses, attacking those weaknesses, watching the way we all dealt with being attacked. Because there was no avoiding the attacks, you got attacked. That's what happened. That was part of what would happen. And you figured out how to live with the attacks because you had to live there. You had to go to that school. You had to live in that neighborhood. You know, you lived there. Here we are now. We're in this world of— this community where we're connecting with one another. Getting to know one another, and, you know, we've been watching what's happening as we start to figure out how we're going to be together here. And, you know, Peri, uh, made a video about, um, Bonnie and her experiences recently, and, you know, we've all We've all seen, and some of us more than others, have been the targets of these kinds of attacks. And, um, you know, for me growing up in the kind of environment that I just described was, um, painful and Very informative. It taught me a lot about people and a lot about who I was and who I wanted to be. I was never very good at the attacking part of the world that we lived in. I mean, I did it. But I was never very good at it. I was not one of the aces of the attacking. I had something— there was something in me that at that time I wasn't too crazy about. You know, I wished I wasn't as averse to attacking people as I was and am today. I wished I was more of a son of a bitch and that it didn't bother me that people really got hurt by the things that were said and done, but I wasn't. I couldn't help it. I wasn't and I'm not. And eventually I grew to be proud of that about myself, that that's not who I am and that's not what I do. But we're all in the process of discovering ourselves with each other every day. And Perry says that, you know, some of these people who attack are adolescents, and some are, some are older. Not age, although I think, you know, when we're young, we're probably given to more attention and focus on things that are different from us and how we react to them. I don't know, I think that's part of what happens as we get older. We talk about maturity, and a lot of what we're talking about with maturity I think is a sense of the full range of the world and what people are like and recognizing— we didn't all recognize what disasters we were when we were adolescents. We just knew that the other person was a disaster. We were pretty cool, you know, with the exception of these few little flaws. But as you get older, you know, you recognize, come on, you know, it's pretty much an across-the-board phenomenon that we're all We're all pretty fragile and we all figure out how to deal with that in the ways that we figure out how to deal with it. And over time, you know, you come to appreciate that about ourselves and recognize, you know, this is— we are in this together. We are in this together. That sense of we are in this together and that we care about being in it together is what civilization and civility is about. Um, and we have to figure out how to develop civility here. We have to figure out how to develop it. We have to figure out how to encourage it. We have to figure out how to discourage incivility. We have to figure out how to recognize where the lines are when incivility becomes illegality, and we have to figure out what to do with it. When it does, and we have to figure out how to be vigilant about retaining civility so that we don't lose people from— valuable people from this community. I know that sounds stupid, but it's what I feel. I think it's a loss if we lose somebody like Bonnie. I think it's a big loss. I think it's a big loss. I think it's a big loss to lose voices that speak to us from different points of view within the boundaries of our common shared civility together. So street teams are great. Mike is gonna be, you know, a big part of making sure that we figure out how to be legal first of all and maybe civil. That's a great order. I think we have to start with legal. But we can't abrogate our responsibility to the street team or to anybody else. Perry's right. We've got to figure out ourselves how we're going to do these things together and then do them. Do them. We have to do them. We can't just talk about it. And none of us wants to be the target of this stuff. I'm not eager to put myself out there. I didn't get a lot of hate comments until I made a video about Renetto. I got some seriously profane, few seriously profane comments, which I didn't take down, I left up. I grew up in the place that is the mother of all profanity. So profanity's sort of, it's been a part of my life all my life, so profanity. But we gotta figure this out. We gotta figure this out.
