Disagreements happen to everyone, at work, at home, in public life. What actually separates a fair fight from an unfair one is often not the disagreement itself, but who ends up caught in the middle of it. Hulk Hogan, the professional wrestler, put a simple boundary around exactly that. "If I have a problem with someone I talk about them," he said. "I don't pick on their kids." The quote appears to date from a genuinely difficult stretch of his life, around his very public divorce, when his own family became a regular subject of tabloid coverage and intense public scrutiny. It is a short line, but it holds a genuinely useful boundary that plenty of people forget to draw once a disagreement actually gets heated, emotional and increasingly personal. It's a simple rule, easy to state and harder to actually keep once emotions run high, which is probably why it needed saying out loud in the first place rather than being left as something everyone just assumes.
Get breaking news anytime, anywhere. Download the TOI app now!
