Guess what?! Not everyone is hateful! (Or how predictable yet bummer antisemitism turned into the best day I’ve had in ages!)
Ok, so!
I have a stupid little game I play on my phone. It’s nbd and you join a little team and fight zombies. I love to play before bed or on my lunch breaks to take my mind off things.
One thing about this game is that you can have a national flag in your profile pic. You don’t have to, but people are from everywhere and it’s kinda cool to see. Idk about all other teams, but my team has a VERY strict “no politics at all” rule. Fine. Great, even. I could use a break from that. I don’t want politics in my relaxing resource management zombie game.
I had the US flag for the first week of playing, and someone joined my team with the username “Antizionism.” I messaged the game leader and said “hey, I don’t want to get into the weeds of this. But that dude’s username is a bummer.” Leader messaged me back and said “I’m sorry I didn’t even see them join. I’ve messaged them and said they need to change their name or they’ll be removed from our group.” Idk what the ended up doing but I had no trouble from anyone again there. I was so pleased by this guy’s swift action.
The weeks went by and the game has been great. No politics. No strife. After the Antizionism guy, I was a little worried about encountering hatred after forming relationships on the team. So I immediately changed the flag from USA to Israel. I figured, if anyone was gonna show up and be an ass, I’d rather know early on that my team hated me than have it be a surprised after I make new friends. Nobody batted an eye or said anything. It was great. A guy with a Palestinian flag joined. We became good friends! No issues at all!!! It’s like a little digital utopia but it’s a digital zombie apocalypse LOL.
As we’ve all progressed in the game, we keep getting new features and challenges. Unfortunately, one of those new challenges is a weekly event where everyone in our little server gets to battle with a specific other server. Our opponents change each week. My server is super chill and great. Other servers? Not so much. I started getting private messages from people I’ve never met or interacted with in the game saying, “Palestine is better.” Like…ok. Annoying. But shrugged it off. They can think that. It doesn’t affect me. But last night I got one from someone that called me a “baby killer.”
Unfortunately, the game does not offer a way to send an image privately to leadership. So I had to go on the main team chat window and share the pic and essentially say “hey. Can a team leader take care of this? It’s bumming me out. I wanted to message privately about this but can’t find any way to send pix. Sorry to post something like this in the group thread. Idk what else to do.”
I had expected them to kick me out of the group for breaking the no politics rule (tbh, it would’ve been fair. Everyone else has stayed FAR away from politics or anything even tangentially related. They keep it a really safe space over there and even though the harassment was directed at me, I felt bad about bringing the topic up in front of everyone and violating that safe space). At BEST I thought they’d say they’d use their admin privileges to reach out to the harasser’s team leader and ask them to stop.
I got a message notification from a group leader that began “I found (the message you sent earlier). Listen to me very closely…” and thought, “Here it comes. I’m getting yelled at or kicked out. Oh, well.” I went back to work for a few hours and then finally opened my messages. It…was not what I expected.
Here are the comments I got from a whole bunch of different people in the group, starting with the one from the notification preview:
One person even messaged me on discord! (R4 just means team leader, an honor offered to me many times but that I have turned down because I know it would lead to increased exposure to other servers and more harassment)
Turns out, some people don’t need antisemitism spelled out for them like toddlers. Some people just recognize it for what it is. And as a result I feel more sane than I have for the past 3 years. People can be very very very good sometimes!
