The Kindness of Strangers

If I had written this three months ago, I would have entitled it The Vileness of Strangers. That was when hundreds of people I'd never met started posting on my social media accounts and sending me IMs and texts and emails through my personal website that were all a variation on: "Die, stupid bleep." (One of them then added, rather incongruously, "And fix your ugly teeth.") They also sent dozens of messages to dozens of my friends, the ones with public Facebook accounts, that were a variation on: "Your friend is a stupid bleep who deserves to die." All because they disagreed with my political views and because an online hate group* then posted and amplified lies about me and urged them to chase me with their virtual pitchforks. That was when I lost my job and lost my faith in nearly everyone and everything.

How It Started

There is an NDA, an ongoing investigation, a potential lawsuit and lots of trolls who have handles like Adam in Jersey (which I'm guessing should more accurately be Adam in His Mom's Basement in Jersey) and Fuck you NAZI still obsessively scrolling through my social media accounts waiting to pounce, so I will leave it more or less at that. I will just say that the campaign to destroy me was mobilized so ruthlessly and efficiently by a state-run troll farm that weeks and months after they doxxed me, people were sifting through eight-year-old posts I made on friends' public pages so they could reply to "Hey, Gorgeous!" posted in response to someone's new profile pic, with their scripted garbage.

Someone texted me pretending to be a reporter from a local newspaper to try to terrorize me. I posted a photo I took of a flower on my Instagram page and someone replied within a day: "Is [my son's name here] proud of you?" Yes. Yes, he is proud of me for standing up for what I believe in. Are your kids proud of you, the internet troll who has nothing better to do than monitor a stranger's social media accounts 24/7?

And Then Went On

I stopped counting the threats and the days and weeks that they kept coming. But I couldn't stop what they did to me. The human psyche can bear hate but not this aggro, steroidal form of it. It's like the difference between what a pistol does to a body and what a semi-automatic weapon does to it. It didn't just damage me, it shredded me and ground the resulting pieces into sludge.

Things fell behind and fell apart. Last fall, my son, the one who is very proud of me, spent several days in the hospital after undergoing emergency surgery. In the EOB from my insurer was a note instructing me not to pay any bill from the hospital due to a clerical error that it had made. So even though I then received a few bills in varying amounts, I ignored them all, which was easy since ignoring everything was the only way I could not not go on.

The Phone Bank Guy

Time unspooled. I was lost in a zombie fog of self-loathing and self-pity and suicidal ideation. Then I got a dunning letter from a collection agency and decided it was maybe time to call the hospital billing department, steeling myself for what I knew would be an unpleasant conversation. The person who picked up was in a phone bank in India. And he could not have been more gently sympathetic and sweetly patient. A stranger, rather than viciously kicking me in the face over and over, was being nice to me. That hadn't happened to me in more than three months. I started sobbing. "Are you crying? I'm so sorry," said the disembodied voice.

This man who was 8,000 miles away was offering me his hanky. I started sobbing harder. I'm sure he must have thought the bill was for a patient who was now deceased. (Spoiler alert: My son is still alive, though there are apparently people who have never clapped eyes on him who think he doesn't deserve to be simply because he is related to me.) I wish I had been able to stop gasping and sniffling and ask this person his name. I would have given him the best customer service review of his life.

I'm Not Alone

He asked me if I wanted to set up a payment plan. He asked me if I wanted him to patch me through to Medicaid to make the bill go away. He told me the bill, which was in my son's name, would not affect his credit score and that everything would be OK and repeated that he was very sorry. I cried and cried and cried.

Yesterday an article ran in a national news outlet about the victims of a similar hate group and the comments, before they were turned off, overwhelmingly said things like: 1) This is not cool and 2) This will win over exactly zero hearts and minds.

It turns out there are other strangers out there who don't hate me or what I believe in. Lots of them. Maybe a few will sit on a jury one day and at least partly undo what has been done. In the meantime, I have people who care about me in my life right now: my friends, my family and a hospital phone bank operator somewhere in India.

*This is part of the disclaimer the hate group, that I won't link to because I refuse to give them the clicks, runs with every one of their posts: "We do not endorse hate speech or violence of any kind." To which I say: "And fix your ugly teeth."