Allow me, if you will, to indulge in some wild speculation.
First, the person responsible for sending suspect packages to three SNP targets this week is a bampot and second, they’re a bampot that regularly uses social media.
I could be wrong, of course. The person, or persons responsible, may never have ventured near Twitter or any other site that allows people to indulge in the sort of anti-social behaviour that would not be tolerated in the real world.
Finding an intelligent discussion on Twitter is like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.
Instead, it allows like-minded people to coalesce, creating an echo chamber where their views are never challenged.
Crucially, this also, inevitably, leads to people who they may disagree with politically being demonised.
It’s the sort of nonsense that eventually does lead to emergency services making the dash from Dundee to Forfar because some innocent council worker may have been exposed to deadly anthrax.
Venturing onto Twitter in the wake of these incidents was a sadly illuminating insight into political discourse in Scotland in the 21st century.
The anti-SNP brigade were convinced the whole sorry episode was a false-flag operation: that SNP supporters had send the packages in order to make unionists look bad.
Meanwhile, their equivalents in the independence movement were bemoaning the fact the media wasn’t covering the story and saying the arrest in of a terror suspect in Whitehall was a set-up to distract from the attacks on the SNP.
The correct response to this sort of conspiracy-driven idiocy is, of course, a pox on both their houses. And it’s important to remember this sort of nuttiness does not reflect the thinking of most unionists or independence supporters.
But the idea that a Conservative, or SNP, or voter of any particular party is intrinsically bad, or good, is one that should be resisted. Sadly, though, it is gaining currency.
This, handily, brings me to the thorny issue of flowers outside Broughty Ferry library.
At Dundee City Council on Monday, Tory councillor Derek Scott asked whether the £6,000 being spent on sustainable flowerbeds at Broughty Ferry library would affect their current displays.
No, came the reasonable response from convener John Alexander.
On social media however, one SNP councillor said this was the Conservatives “moving that plants are more important than you know, poverty or something.”
There is an election in the offing so I’ll spare the councillor’s blushes and refrain from naming them.
But politicians everywhere, from councillors up, have a responsibility to set the tone of the debate.
Comments, presumably made in jest, that people in other parties “don’t care about poverty” don’t just lower the tone, they encourage a black and white view of the world that helps no one.
