If you apply 'anything goes' on your rivals, how long will it take you to use it on your peers?

One of the things that my parents taught me when I was little is honor, righteousness when it comes to acting, and rejecting the idea that anything goes in life.

Without a doubt, I have made many mistakes and will continue to make them, but I never forget that teaching of my parents. If I forgot her, my life would be like a ship adrift. If we throw our honor overboard, we degrade ourselves as people. If we believe that anything goes in the field of politics, then what are we better at than our enemies? If we do not defend a noble cause by legitimate means, then does that cause deserve to be defended? And are we not dishonoring the nobility of that cause by defending it with ignoble means?

I write this because this afternoon I saw some people on social networks sharing the supposed home address of the parents of a left-wing politician. The purpose of this dissemination is said to be to overthrow the law that leaves unpunished illegal occupation of homes. The Twitter account that has spread this data - which is private - has threatened to continue publishing other addresses of other politicians (or their families, given what has been seen).

I was amazed to see the number of people who have shared and cheered that publication, with the most bizarre excuses. It seems that they do not realize thatin addition to being wrong to do that, it is a crime. And it is a crime whoever the politician affected is. I do not want to fail to mention a detail that some seem to have ignored: an anonymous Twitter account is not a notary, and no one certifies that the data disseminated is from those people and not from others. That is to say, the address of a family may be being exposed that is not even the one indicated in the message, and that may suffer the foreseeable consequences of hundreds or thousands of people disclosing their home address. In the net.

It is difficult for me to understand what someone who does those things thinks, and who is intended to benefit from behavior like that. Not on the right, of course, because by doing it someone from the right - supposedly - gets that this action be associated with its entire political environment. Certainly, the left will be delighted to have rivals capable of falling so low and catching up with them morally speaking, since that is a way of legitimizing actions like that which he already did the left. For my part, the fact that the left falls this low does not seem like an excuse for people on the right to do the same. If the left is going to be our moral reference, how are we different from it?

On the other hand, when someone considers that this way of acting is legitimized against a political rival, who guarantees that sooner or later they will not end up considering that "anything goes" is also applicable to their like-minded people? There is only a small step between one position and another. I'm not talking about hypotheses: history is full of examples, and unfortunately I have already had to suffer on several occasions from people who said they were like-minded and who, when faced with a disagreement, decided that they became an enemy and everything was against me. I am already more than chastened, and I refuse to contribute, not even with my silence, to this being done.

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Photo: Anthony Tori.