Now that some of the fire and fury surrounding the bogus missile alert have subsided, can we talk about the death threats?

I mean, shame on you gooses for death-threatening anybody. That’s just stupid and you know it. No matter how scared you were that Saturday morning or how mad you got when you found out you were scared for nothing, that doesn’t justify making illegal threats against state employees. Go take a shower. Go pull some weeds. Get your head right.

But on the other side, is it not a little, um, odd that the state agency in charge of protecting us from scary stuff like monster hurricanes, massive tsunamis and nuclear missiles would be all aflutter about people saying mean stuff on social media?

Kinda sensitive, yeah?

Gov. David Ige and Hawaii Emergency Management Agency leaders were expressing outrage about death threats from the very beginning, even while the entire state was recovering from the shock of their death threat of a fake missile warning. They took great umbrage at the inappropriate expressions of anger, said they were taking it seriously and would be forwarding the threats to the appropriate authorities, pressing charges and all that. The “button pusher” reportedly got death threats. The guy who was mistakenly identified as the button pusher got death threats. They were all scared and upset.

But OK, for the record, when somebody says, “Eh, you sucka, I going kick your ass,” that is not a death threat. Perhaps, depending on the context, it could be seen as a threat of bodily harm. But in most cases it’s just somebody talking big and blowing off steam. Many of us hear that kind of language every day in traffic, on the bus, fighting for parking at the grocery store or dropping off our kid in the preschool auto line. We don’t file a police report. We shrug it off. In one ear, out the other.

Isn’t HI-EMA trained in threat analysis? Aren’t they specialists in analyzing whether any given threat is credible and imminent or just some angry goose acting stupid?

But the detail above all others that underlines the stupidity of these supposed death threats is that they were sent by phone, social media and fax.

Fax???

Oh, come on.

How could anyone take seriously a death threat sent by fax? Who even has a fax machine anymore? Geez, was it faxed from another state office?

Look, people say really stupid, mean stuff on social media these days. They shouldn’t but they do. If Mother Teresa were alive and had a social media presence, people would even post mean stuff about that nice nun. You can’t take all of it seriously. To preserve one’s sanity, most learn to filter: to ignore the inflammatory posts, avoid reading online comments, delete phone messages from strange numbers. We all know that, right? It’s only when push alerts flash across our phones and crawl across our TVs we know we should take a threat seriously.

Oh … wait.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.