I
have long referred to Twitter as “The Realm of the Damned”, and I’ve
seen little in my infrequent trips there that gives me pause to change
my mind. I have a theory that the 140-character
limit tends to distill stupid down to its essence (though in fairness
it can also do the same for brilliance in the right hands), and there
has been no shortage of that going around today. I won’t glorify the
troglodyte in question by posting his Twitter handle
or showing a screenshot of the tweets, but the upshot is that some
Gooners have responded to Spurs supporters trolling about Theo Walcott’s
injury with some truly vile anti-Semitic keyboard vomit.
Let’s
be crystal clear about this – these people are about as representative
of Gooner fandom as a cancerous tumor is of an entire body.
One
thing that has never failed to astonish me about this club is how
multi-cultural it is and always has been. Here in New York, when you
step into the Blind Pig or O’Hanlon’s, you will
see a tremendous range of people united in a common cause. The first
time I went to Highbury, I had long conversations about our club and
football in general with people from as far away as Senegal. When I go
into the Admin section of the NYC Arsenal Supporters
Facebook page, I see that our average user is an 18-25 year old from
Bangkok, Thailand (no, really…that’s true). Every week when I write a
match report (well, not every week based on my performance this season,
but you know what I mean), I love to scroll through
the people who click “Like” and see how many different countries they
represent. I mean, I come home from the pub half in the bag and type some bollocks
about a match you’ve all already seen, and people thousands of miles
away take time out of their day to read it, in
a language that often isn’t their first.
If that doesn’t say it all about the values of what this club actually represents, I don’t know what else to tell you.
That’s
why it gets to me more than it probably should when I see some dipshit
on Twitter saying stuff like this. It especially enrages me when “LOL
#BANTZ” is the catch-all excuse for everything,
no matter how disgusting and anti-social it may be. Banter is one thing
– you only sing when you’re winning, Soldado is shit and he knows he
is, 61 and never again, Tottenham Hotspur it’s happened again – but I’d
like to think that there is a line that most
right-thinking people can agree on somewhere to the nearest decimal
point.
As
far as I’m concerned, anything that happened in 1942 is well beyond
that point, unless it happens to be how Arsenal won the special wartime
London League that season (even back then, they were still forever in our shadow).
Hearteningly,
the person in question got his and then some by Gooners angered at what
they were saying in our collective name. Good. It would be even better if the
club itself would go onto Twitter
in times like this with a simple “People who discriminate on race,
creed, sexual orientation, etc are not welcome in our club. Go support
someone else”, so that thousands of retweets later the message would be
louder and clearer than it is now.
Don’t
get me wrong – I am not trying to hold us up as the only club whose
supporters largely consist of good people. There are plenty of Tottenham
fans out there who are fine human beings,
albeit ones who made an unfortunate mistake in rooting interest
somewhere along the way. That goes for damn near every other club as
well – I know plenty of Liverpool and Chelsea and Manchester United and
Manchester City supporters who I am proud to call my friends.
Our club support is absolutely a part of who we are, but it is not and
never should be ALL of who we are. The line should end at real life.
We're better than that. We are the Arsenal.
