We all live in glass houses now

Opinion

In the 19th century, stocks and pillories were still in use in Canada, with people put on public display, their necks, hands or feet clamped into hinged wooden frames for a few hours as punishment for crimes like public drunkenness or disorder, theft and perjury.

Here’s a brief history of the pillory from Terry Bracher, the archives and local studies manager at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre in Chippenham, England:

“Its use dates back to Anglo-Saxon times where it was known as ‘Healsfang’ or ‘catch-neck.’ In France it was called the pillorie. …It was considered to be a degrading punishment with offenders standing in the pillory for several hours to be abused by fellow citizens, sometimes being pelted with all manner of organic material such as rotten eggs, mud and filth. If that was not enough, sometimes the offender was drawn to the pillory on a hurdle, accompanied by minstrels and a paper sign hung around his or her head displaying the offence committed.”

I was reminded of this medieval practice recently when I found my social media feed flooded with posts about a brouhaha at a Sept. 5 baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Miami Marlins in Florida.

I’m not a baseball fan, but I was intrigued enough by the sheer number of posts to try and figure out what the feeding frenzy on X was about.

It turns out that after Phillies centre-fielder Harrison Bader hit a home run into the stands, several people grabbed for the ball. A man, Drew Feltwell, got it and gave it to his 10-year-old son.

Unhappy with that outcome, an unidentified woman in a Phillies jersey confronted Feltwell and angrily demanded he give the ball back to her. After a brief exchange, he did.

Spark, meet tinder. Whoosh!

X exploded into fiery flames of moral outrage.

A post from @ExxAlerts included a photo of the woman, with the exhortation:

“ALERT: X users are asking for the image of the woman who DEMANDED a ball from a father and his LITTLE BOY at a Phillies game tonight to go viral, so she may be held accountable. HERE SHE IS.”

Another message contained a photo of the woman framed within an old wild west “Wanted” poster.

@ChrisFischer wrote: “Do your thing Twitterverse make her famous #Phillies #Karen #Marlins”

@BigFish3000 posted: “She went home with the baseball. Woke up with the entire country hating on her. Funny how life works.”

Someone with the handle @LangmanVince assumed they had the woman all figured out:

“I’ll bet everything I own that she’s double vaxxed, triple boosted, works in HR, has pronouns in her bio, attended the no kings protest over the summer, believes climate change is real, has two cats, and voted for Kamala Harris.”

At least two people were incorrectly identified on X as the woman who walked away with the ball and had to essentially produce an alibi to protect themselves from public shaming.

Feltwell’s son, the initial recipient of the ball, later got to meet Bader — who signed a bat for him — and was showered with baseball swag, World Series tickets and a free RV as the social media agitation peaked.

Drew Feltwell himself eventually called for calm and asked the tar-and-feathers crowd to leave the woman alone.

Fortunately, there were a couple of other sympathetic souls on X.

@thevivafrei wrote: “The trend of doxxing and harassing people for minor public misbehaviour is getting wildly out of control. People really need to chill the F out and just imagine what would happen if someone recorded them at a less-than-optimal moment. Geeze…”

Now, I’ve watched the video of the incident and the woman’s reaction to having lost the ball does seem a little extreme, particularly as she argued with Feltwell in front of his children.

But who am I to know what actually happened? Perhaps she’d had the ball in her hands and Feltwell grabbed it, and she felt like she’d been robbed. Maybe she was having a horrible day and losing the ball was just an added layer of crappy over-sweet icing on top of a dried-out storebought cake.

Many people on social media didn’t seem to care to wonder why.

That’s today’s sad reality.

We all live in glass houses now. Most everyone has a cellphone camera with video capability and we’re all potentially in the spotlight, facing the glare, vulnerable during our worst moments, and even for inconsequential things. One social slip can haunt you, with people you’ve never met calling you names, saying you should be fired from your job and shunned by your family, harmed and harassed.

People may be hurling digital invective instead of rotten tomatoes and horse dung, but thanks to social media, the days of pillorying are alive and well.

Pam Frampton lives in St. John’s. Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com | X: @Pam_Frampton | Bluesky: @pamframpton.bsky.social