Being appropriately disagreeable

This post was supposed to be written a few days ago, but I was either too busy or coughing too much to bother.
28th April 2012 has come and gone. I was glued to the computer all afternoon and evening monitoring how Bersih 3.0 was going. I have many friends who were there among the crowds, and I wanted to know that they were okay. I needed to know how the rally went.
There is enough on the net to let everyone know how it went. So I am not writing about how it went. Nor am I writing about the incidents that happened that day.
Being an armchair observer, I saw many posts on the net, whether on facebook, or twitter or even youtube about what 428 was about and what they thought it was about. What struck me was not their explanations of their understanding of the event. What struck me was how disagreeable many people can be and how many do not seem to understand the issue at hand. From the top ranks to the everyday man on the street, to youngsters ... the kind of comments and words, and language they used, I would not let my children read them.
How some people who profess to be mature men and women can use profanities in expressing their disagreements, I simply fail to understand. They can say that they are educated people who are exposed to the matters of the world, and yet the words that come out of their mouths (or typed into comments on the net) just do not reflect how "educated" they are. It is unbecoming when these people do not open their eyes and heart to the possibility that they have been narrow-minded, and they have not understood what that day was about, or that nothing warrants brutality or that nothing warrants the kind of language used. No, I am not necessarily commenting on those who did not support the rally. I also have a bone to pick with those who do, because some of them have absolutely no understanding of what it is about, and just rattle on as if they do, and they refuse to agree to disagree.
Come on, people. There are always two sides to a story, perhaps even more. Everyone has a version to voice out. And we are all in a relatively free country, and we can voice out what we think. But that does not mean that we can just bombard profanities or even be vulgar towards people who disagree with us. It really saddens me that there are so many people who do not know how to disagree and yet have some respect for others who are of different opinions as they.