In this day and age, it's really hard to be the bigger man, and there's nowhere this applies more than the Wild Wild West social network that is Twitter. Over the past 18 months or so, we've seen the battlegrounds move away from real life and corrosive talk show hosts, and closer towards small soundbites and retweets.
Even the president does it now.
But every now again, for every harassment campaign or flame war, we get an act of genuine kindness or genuine comedy. Sometimes, the guys who provide the kindness are the ones we usually look to for a decent laugh. Take, for example Patton Oswalt.
As one of the biggest comedians of our current times, Patton Oswalt has a pretty prominent Twitter presence, so the Ratatouille star is probably used to people talking smack to him, especially when he makes jokes of a political nature.
That's what he did earlier this week, when he responded to a tweet from Donald Trump relating to the border wall that has led to a month-long government shutdown. This tweet:
Patton Oswalt, naturally, had jokes for this particular rhyming remark from Trump, and had a response of his own to go with it:
Standard Twitter stuff so far, I think you'll agree. Especially once Michael Beatty got into the conversation, defending Trump and talking some serious smack to Oswalt in the process. "I just realized why I was so happy you died in Blade Trinity!" he said to the comedian, before adding: "And you shoot basketball ike [sic] the sawed off little man you are."
Now, it would have been easy for Oswalt to track down the Twitter troll on this occasion, and give him a dose of his own medicine. In fact, the 50-year-old fully intended to do that, but first went to Beatty's Twitter page. And that's when he found out something rather sad.
Michael Beatty, it turned out, was a veteran from the Vietnam war who had fallen on hard times. He had recently been hospitalised for two weeks after a complication with sepsis and diabetes, and even slipped into a coma during that time. Oswalt took pity on the man, and instead of attacking him, encouraged his followers to help him.
"Aw, man. This dude just attacked me on Twitter and I joked back but then I looked at his timeline and he’s in a LOT of trouble health-wise. I’d be pissed off too," he said to the 4.5 million people who read his tweets, and revealed that he gave $2,000 on GoFundMe to help Michael with his health issues.
Donations to Michael Beatty immediately started to flood in, and inundated with not only funding but kindness, Beatty's heart softened. Tweeting at the man who he was savagely attacking only days before, Beatty offered his sincerest gratitude for Patton Oswalt's kindness.
In the modern world, it can be really easy to get drawn into a pointless argument, but this story shows that maybe, instead of pointless squabbling, we should take a moment to find out what's really going on. As Michael Beatty himself says on his Twitter page: "We need not bite at those who bark. For their loud pains may be their whimper."
If you want to donate to Michael's GoFundMe page, you can do so here.
