A Lesson in the Bigger Picture of Outrage

For all of you who are so vocally against Mr. Duck for what he said, please think of the repercussions of your spewing wildly. 

He is a multi-millionaire whose primary source of income isn't affected in any reasonable degree by your outrage. His main consumers, in fact, will probably BOOST their purchases of his duck call products to support him. Plus they'll double down on Duck Dynasty merchandise purchases and viewership.

Outside of income, the man and his family and their entire social circle are not affected in the least, socially, by your outrage. Do you not understand where he lives and what people there think about "liberal" opinions?

Who are you outraging to affect? He and people who think like him aren't going to pay you the slightest bit of attention anyway. You and the people who think like you already think like you. There's a middle ground of people who don't think at all, I suppose, but what's the real point in shouting for them if they are too dumb to have an opinion?

In summation, you've shouted, upset your FRIENDS who disagree with you (because the people you're debating with are hopefully friends and not complete strangers you let have access to your facebook wall), and further enriched a millionaire and entrenched him as someone "brave enough to speak his mind/beliefs even in the face of losing money" to a base of people who hold that as a cardinal virtue.

If your response is, "I don't want to be friends with people who think that", guess what? That's fine for this particular issue, but the bigger problem with holding to that is that if you require all your friends to think exactly like you do, a) you're whittling your potential friends to an unnecessarily small group of people who are redundant since they're not bringing any insight and b) sweet christ, how sheltered do you need to be from being displeased?  You're living in the exact bubble that Mr. Duck is. Way to go, dodo.

None of which is to say that you should casually accept bigotry or "hate". But I'd wait until an idiot sounds a call to action rather than sounds off on his underdeveloped opinion. The reasonable, intelligent thing to do is take note when someone says something you vehemently disagree with and treat them accordingly. If you were a fan of Duck Dynasty, stop watching and participating (buying merchandise, promoting it, etc). Be (moderately) quiet about it so as not to give them the reactionary bump/boost.

Or you can continue to bleat and ego-masturbate in your comfortable self-righteousness.

(edited 1/5/2014 because of an egregious attribution of of The Walking Dead to A&E instead of AMC...sheesh)