Sometimes I get in my head and think I'm somebody and then I'm easily offended, but when I know I'm a nobody I could never be offended.
It was Mike Tyson, the great heavyweight boxing champion who said the above in a reply to a question asked by Tucker Carlson from Fox News on the Tucker Carlson Today show on how he coped with criticism.
Many people end up getting in trouble for saying or doing things either as a joke or without much thought which end up offending other people.
This appeared to happen in increasing frequency in this country of late.
Honestly, I doubt many people really pay attention to those types of people.
A majority of the ordinary rakyat, the peace-loving Malaysians, know that if they pay attention to these people, indirectly, they give `life’ to the offending statement or actions.
The majority of the ordinary rakyat knows better than to give these people dignity for their statements or actions.
Like the quip by Mike Tyson, if someone’s words hurt your feelings then you’re a weak person.
They can't offend you if you let them know you didn't react to it.
Being offended comes from feeling like someone is trying to tell you that you are less than you think you are.
In other words, you think highly of yourself and get offended by anything that disagrees with that notion.
Different societies have mostly unspoken agreements on how to show respect and disrespect.
It should be everyone’s own responsibility to learn these rules.
People get offended by things that violate their ideas about acceptable behaviour.
Not everyone is going to be offended by exactly the same things and it's not reasonable to think that we can get through life without ever offending anyone.
But when it happens, we do have a responsibility to try to learn why we caused offence and consider whether we need to change our behaviour or attitudes.
Sometimes we might conclude that a person's ideas about acceptable behaviour are simply unreasonable. But if we start from the assumption that the other person is always the problem, then we are going to miss out on opportunities to learn something and do a worse job of actually communicating with people.
If someone says something that really bothers us, we can't just take that away and decide to not care. What we should do is have a conversation with that person, so that each of us realizes where the other is coming from, and hopefully just resolve it that way.
Either that person will realize that it bothers us and avoid doing it again or they will realize that there really was no harm intended and that we are being overly sensitive.
In fact, because of the internet and social media, everyone has become an author in today’s environment.
An author published their thoughts online and broadcasted them for the world to see.
Often a public response is generated.
If you do that, you have become "the author."
So are you going to be offended by everything you read or see on social media?
The author's intentions don't matter.
It is how the audience receives it that is the true meaning behind the words.
The meaning of the words then becomes the meaning that the readers take from it - not the meaning that the author intended.
The author can't follow around every person who reads his or her words and explains his or her meaning and say "No, I really meant this."
Instead, the interpretation that the readers get from it is the real meaning.
If that interpretation is different from what the author intended, then it's the author's "fault" for failing to properly convey his or her intended message.
Are you somebody who will be offended?
Politicians in Malaysia always forget their roots i.e. they are a nobody before joining politics.
But once they joined politics, they got into their heads and thought that they were somebody.
That’s when they get offended easily.
But they forgot that by showing they get offended easily in public, they are actually revealing to the ordinary rakyat their very weakness which is they don’t have the EQ to be a leader in this nation.
Anyway to the ordinary rakyat, don't worry too much about them.
As always, just be kind even though history has never been kind to these types of people regardless of wherever they are.
It is the politicians who thought and believed that all of them are somebody.
That is why it is always they who are always the first to claim that they are offended.
Not the ordinary rakyat.
The ordinary rakyat is just nobody in this country.
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