“Discretion is the better part of valor.”

— Falstaff, in King Henry the Fourth, Part One, by William Shakespeare

A Pennsylvania woman says she regrets what she posted on Facebook about the people killed a week ago in Las Vegas. “I (expletive) up,” 60-year-old Delinda Jensen admits now.

In our era of knee-jerk tweets and rampant social media, let her indiscretion serve as words of caution to the rest of us.

Jensen, 60, of Wilkes-Barre, is an outspoken vegan. She operated a vegan cuisine food truck. After the Mandalay Bay shootings on Sunday, Jensen commented on her Facebook page: “Yes I am jaded. Fifty nine meat eaters dead. How many animals will live because of this? ... I don’t give a (expletive) about carnists anymore.”

The backlash was overwhelming, Jensen told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader newspaper. There were avalanches of stinging rebukes on social media and more than a few death threats.

“She is out of business and her bright green food truck is in a secret storage area,” the report reads.

Jensen simply should have known better. She doesn’t lack for education: the report mentions her previous job as an adjunct history professor. As a business owner, she should know the value of tact. She should have known that unnecessary provocations might alienate her clientele and hurt her business.

Now, Jensen emphatically insists she was not happy about the death of 59 people. She says she’s sorry about what she wrote, and the way she wrote it. “Meat eaters or not, no one deserves to die like that,” she said. “I wasn’t celebrating the death of those people. That’s not how vegans think — we are non-violent.”

But her comments are out there, shared multiple times. Jensen can’t take them back now. Intending to boost her pet cause of veganism, she cause it more harm than good.

Practically all of us can relate. Everyone on social media has written and read offensive comments at least once or twice.

It was particularly disturbing to attach a completely unrelated social issue to a mass murder. Are we becoming desensitized to such carnage because of the frequency of its occurrence? Let’s hope the response to Jensen’s post indicates that we are not.

Regardless, it should be routine for everyone — from elementary school pupil to the president — to think twice before pushing the enter button. Does my post say what I intended it to say? If it doesn’t, don’t post it.