With age comes wisdom. As I grew older, I realized that everything that was directed towards me did not deserve a response. Even when someone is wrong in an argument or disagreement, sometimes you getting the last word is not worth the backlash and the consequences behind going back and forth with that person.
We as individuals have to learn how to communicate. Just because someone disagrees with you, does not make them your enemy. People can have different opinions about situations and still live in peace with one another. It is so sad that in this day and time, so many people fall out over social medial. One person may post a political status, and someone else may disagree with it. The person that disagrees feels so strongly about their point of view to where they comment in an offensive way, and this is how conflict begins.
I follow a lot of news sources on Facebook. One of my favorite things to do on social media is to read the comments under news articles' posts, especially controversial ones. Recently, the news in Mississippi, my home state, posted an article about a high school band performance that acted out a skit from the movie "John Q" with toy guns with the message "Put the guns down and pray."
People absolutely LOST IT. They were saying that the kids should have been expelled, the coaches, and the entire football program should be suspended because of the band performance. They even went on to say that the principal and superintendent of Jackson Public Schools should be fired because of this one band performance with toy guns. Granted, I understand that toy guns should not have been allowed at a school event, but to say the kids should have been expelled was ridiculous. They were only doing as they were told.
This created the biggest race related argument I have seen thus far on Facebook. It is times like this that I think it is best to know when to keep quiet and keep our opinions to ourselves. People use social media, and news articles to say how they really feel about certain demographics when they would normally not say them in a regular conversation.
This also goes back to our personal lives. You will have so much peace when you learn to not respond to every negative comment made towards you. I have really grown in the sense of knowing when to stop speaking, and just say, "okay." So often we get so headstrong on having to have the last word to where we don't realize that all we are doing is looking foolish. The Bible can back me up on this:
" A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back." - Proverbs 29:11