THE CASE FOR BETTER MANNERS.

Five Milwaukee Brewers made the All-Star Game.  Whether these five over-achieved during the first half of the season, or whether the team will be able to make a playoff run in August and September is yet to be seen.

But relief pitcher Josh Hader's bad inning at the game was overshadowed by a bad day of his permanent record on the internet coming to light.

Hader’s tweets didn’t come out of left field. I’m a firm believer we are what we learn from our family, our communities, the people with whom we surround ourselves. It makes me grateful I live here in DeKalb, where the school district is focusing on socioeconomic needs and police seem to have little to no tolerance for hate crimes.

It also re-emphasizes the importance of having direct, daily conversations with my children about what they hear, what it means and what should be avoided altogether.

That's DeKalb Chronicle columnist Christopher Heimerman, a rare Brewer fan in a nest of Chicago sports enthusiasts, and his message is to parents and teachers about reinforcing in young people that there are some things you just don't say in public, and that you might be wise not to think them in the first place.

It might be that what the seventeen year old Josh Hader put on social media was just Beavis and Butt-head sort of stuff.  Dude, Dude, look what I just found!  Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh.  "Hate crime" might be a bit too much, perhaps we have the Cool Kids (or perhaps the high school athletes) noodling around on social media and coming up with transgressive hip-hop tunes, nowhere near as difficult as striking out the side.  That appears to be the Deadspin interpretation.  "Hader would’ve been 17 years old when he saw fit to fart most of these vile thoughts out into the world—old enough to know better, of course, but young enough to still be a punk teenager, and a punk teenager who was tweeting at a time when Twitter was not remotely what it is now."  And, perhaps, a punk teenager looking for a way to subvert the dominant paradigm without hearing that still, small, voice asking, "is that prudent?"

That sort of restraint might work more generally.  Consider the latest from Inside Higher Ed on microaggressions.

Microassaults are explicit verbal or nonverbal attacks meant to hurt someone, such as using racial epithets. Microinsults are verbal and nonverbal insults that often carry hidden meaning, including, “You’re pretty for a black woman” -- the implication being that black women are not attractive. And microinvalidations invalidate the experiences and existence of the victim, such as, “I don’t see color. I see people for who they are.” While microassaults are typically conscious, microinsults and microinvalidations are often unconscious.

Rather than clutter the conversation with all this micro-stuff, why not call microassaults what they are, which is to say spouting off in ways you know others won't appreciate hearing, and why not socialize the young along the lines of "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all?"