I’m not gonna be nice anymore.

This isn’t a political statement as much as it is a humanitarian one. I actually started this column when I saw that awful letter from F Stevens in this paper on Remembrance Day. Nice timing, I thought, reading his hateful, intolerant spew.

Should The Spec have published it? I’m sure it made F Stevens feel like a hero that day, but instead it showed, in the coming days, those who refused to make room for his bile. Oh, sure, some agree with him. We just saw the outcome of the secret agree-ers to the south of us. Xenophobia and racism are the new black, it appears.

But this isn’t politics, this is fallout from those politics. As if their hatred has long been a heavy burden they can now release, free to both casually denigrate and rage with fire, free to finally assign blame for their own frustrated lives.

Only that election unleashed something else. Those of you feeling safe to now fly your sexist, racist misogynist version of a confederate freak flag should also know that which silenced you, also silenced many of us. And now we too, are relieved of the burden of putting up with that we know we should be calling out.

A colleague of mine was attacked on Twitter. I know, maybe not your preferred conduit for conversation. But in the car industry, we all loosely interact with one another and the medium works for us. Until one man went on the attack, calling her a feminazi, amongst other, ruder, things. Now, this is the go-to word to call women, especially those of us working in male dominated industries. I’ve been called worse. He took a stab at her race (not the same as his own), threw in a standard “bitch” for good measure and put it all up on his account that was interspersed with posts for his job and where he worked. I do the same with my account, but I’m an opinion columnist.

He worked at a car dealership.

We’re journalists, this close-knit crew. It didn’t take long to discover lots of racist screeds on his feed, including that Muslims should GTFO. You can Google that acronym if you don’t know it. He shut down his account when he realized we’d found it, but we have the screenshots. We contacted his employer, who responded within hours. In fact, the owner’s response has been fantastic.

I doubt he’s much older than my oldest son, this lad, and some would say we rained down hard. But if one of my sons was saying those things, he would be subject to Mama Wrath, which is even harsher. Thing is, my kids aren’t perfect but they were raised not to be hate-spitting little misogynistic racists. It was quite easy, actually.

But reading his hateful words that he’d posted so proudly, I’ve instead decided that I will match bold with bold. I will call out the bullies and the haters. I will step in. I will defend.

There is a narcissist to the south who unleashed hatred and erased decades of human progress because he liked to hear people chant his name. He’s left with a job he never really wanted and we’re left with the bitter residue of the algae soaked wave he rolled in on.

I don’t care which way you vote, but I do care that we hold this tattered fabric of humanity together. It’s getting harder to do, with some seemingly desperate to tear it to shreds. We’ve been told we must bridge the divide, to unite to heal.

Kind of hard to do when some are so busy burning those bridges.