Fellow traveler in Frankfurt. Julia Hubbel

Please stop saying you “speak for everyone.”

Julia E Hubbel
8 min readNov 21, 2019

You can only speak for yourself.

I’m as exhausted as my fellow traveler (above) here at the Frankfurt airport.

Medium writers and especially angry commenters, when in full bully mode, seem to love claiming they speak for large groups of folks without bothering to ascertain if said folks either agree with them or in fact give a flying shit one way or another.

Or, in fact if those writers are claiming to represent a POV that has nothing to do with what that person believes.

It tends to rile me, for example, when Fox commenters (some with fake credentials, this seems to be a thing) or some right-wing actor like Gary Sinise say something like “I speak for ALL veterans …” or words to that effect. There’s a lot of that going around.

You do not speak for me, not now, not ever.

In all fairness, Sinese has done plenty for vets. But he seems to think that all vets are Republican Sergeant Rocks. I can think of two very smart, very capable, damned good fellow military journalists who were in the same public affairs office near the Pentagon to which I was assigned in the 1970s who are as blue as a Colorado summer sky. No matter how many honorary military titles Sinise has, he has only worn the uniform in a movie. Not in real life…

--

--

Julia E Hubbel
Julia E Hubbel

Written by Julia E Hubbel

Stay tuned for some crossposting. Right now you can peruse my writing on Substack at https://toooldforthis.substack.com/ More to come soon.

No responses yet