To the Editor:

I’ve been reading the comments under the Altamont Enterprise’s Facebook post about the “No Kings” protest, and I can’t stop thinking about how something as small as a local news thread can hold up such a startling mirror to what’s happening across the country.

Scrolling through, I found the same words repeated like echoes in a hollow room — “clowns,” “idiots,” “nut jobs,” “morons,” “loons.” Protesters were called “dirty Democrats,” “communists,” and “crybabies.”

Others accused them of being “paid to protest” or “out-of-towners.” Some mocked them as “old people,” joked about them smelling of “Bengay and cat pee,” and laughed that it was the “most exercise they’d gotten all year.”

By my count, “clown” appeared five times, “idiot” four, and “waste of time” twice. “Mental illness” and “brainwashed” came up more than once. And scattered among the comments were AI-generated memes of Trump giving protesters the middle finger; a perfect digital symbol of the times: loud, performative, and strangely empty.

It would be easy to laugh it off, to shrug and say, “That’s just Facebook.” But it’s not just Facebook. It’s the sound of something cracking beneath the surface — quiet, but spreading.

What I saw in that thread wasn’t debate — it was decay. A slow rot of empathy, spreading like mold beneath the floorboards of our civic life. When words like “idiot” replace curiosity; when “get a job” stands in for an argument; when we start measuring our neighbors’ worth by their political affiliations, age, vocation or appearance, it’s not politics anymore. It’s contempt. And contempt is contagious.

We are living through a spiritual drought of decency. The wells of our shared humanity are drying up, replaced with quicksand — each insult pulling us a little deeper. We’ve mistaken cruelty for conviction and mockery for strength. We’ve become so addicted to the performance of outrage that we’ve forgotten how to do the quiet work of understanding.

I wasn’t at the Rensselaerville protest. I was at another one, in a different town, at the same time — standing among neighbors who, despite their differences, shared a belief that democracy only survives when ordinary people are willing to show up for it. That’s what makes the local comments so unsettling. They weren’t just mocking a rally; they were mocking participation itself.

The real danger isn’t disagreement. It’s the belief that disagreement makes someone less human. Once we lose the ability to see one another as neighbors, ballots and laws stop meaning much.

Civility isn’t weakness. It’s structure. It’s the scaffolding that keeps a democracy upright. And right now, that structure is creaking under the weight of our contempt.

If we can’t find kindness in a small-town comment section, how can we expect it to survive anywhere else?

Katie Fahrenkopf

Altamont