So yeah. Real quick. Will Smith protecting Jada on national television behind a joke that shouldn’t have been told at all, let alone told on national television, is what happens when people forget that their actions have consequences. Modern society has done a great job of helping us forget that words have the power to build and destroy and that there was a time when destructive words had actual, real-time consequences. Those times bred the innate understanding that misusing wordså could lead to literal harm. You can imagine that in those times, people were slower to speak and more likely to consider the repercussions for their words and actions.

But these digital platforms have enabled us to hide behind our screens (we use to call em “MySpace gangsters”), creating non-stop opportunities to throw verbal and written stones at folks who are physically disconnected. It’s the new norm. We live in a brave new world where we spend hours online, on podcasts, on vlogs, and some of us, on T.V. spewing mostly inadequately researched and half-baked opinions about anyone we please, without consequence. But this new norm is more dangerous than we think. Because this norm has deceived many of us into thinking that there isn’t still in existence a faction of the population willing to meet us at our front doors, given the chance.

Well, Chris got met at the front door. And we could touch on arguments that:

• it was just a joke, or
• the Smith’s should have thicker skin, or
• Will initially laughed, or
• this was a blow up from…