Insults

La Voz de Galicia – July 12, 2026 →

Sometimes, despite myself, I find myself reading the comments on newspaper articles or social media, and I think about how easy it is for all of us to judge or insult without feeling that our judgment, or our insult, is hurting someone. In truth, the news itself doesn’t even have to be something out of the ordinary, or something that provokes a visceral reaction of outrage or grief (like a murder, or a theft targeting the most vulnerable). Any story, of any kind, has the power to elicit all sorts of negative, aggressive, or insulting reactions, often prompted by nothing more than the photograph or the headline chosen by the person who wrote it, and unrelated to the story itself.

The truth is, you don’t even have to do or say anything at all to become the target of that I-don’t-know-what we all seem to carry inside us—that thing that brings out the worst in us whenever we find ourselves in a setting where we believe we have the right to voice our opinion, even when no one has asked for it. I suppose we tell ourselves they’re only words, left there with no intention of offending anyone, with no intention of hurting anyone… without giving much thought to the fact that they do cause some hurt, and they do carry some offense.

Perhaps it’s simply part of who we are, that we’ve always been this way, that we’ve been insulting one another ever since we acquired the tool that made it possible: language. But there’s something about the way language is shared today that sometimes makes it seem as though that proverb of biblical origin—about seeing the speck in someone else’s eye while failing to notice the beam in our own—is more present than ever, and even more dangerous. For, sadly, insults and judgments take up far more space—both visual and moral—than praise and kind words.