Writing, Knitting & Opinions

I had a somewhat difficult conversation with a friend. Not difficult in the “I need to get this off my chest” sort of way. Rather, it touched on several nerves that have troubled me before. I see the bolus of issues framed by the idea that we are different now, in some fundamental and diminished way, than we were decades, or centuries, ago.

Here is what happened. We were talking about FaceBook, and net groups, and public forums. The friend, clearly distressed, brought up how rude people were, particularly when they could remain anonymous. Examples of some particularly crude comments were shared, much, much saltier than Horschack’s “Up your nose with a rubber hose” quip. The comments were anatomical in nature. We’ve all seen them.

I chimed in with what I do at school when I hear crude comments. People egging each other on, nickers in a twist, yada, yada.

The friend retorted that that wasn’t the point. Times had changed. Where are the days of yore when everyone was polite and no one felt free saying in public that (insert a crude comment here). Something ought to be done!

“What,” I asked, I thought reasonably, “do you want done?”

“They need to be made to stop.” Not, apparently, just made to stop making the comments, but made to stop the entitlement to say what they please.

This quandary, then, comes in two parts. The first causes me to wonder if we have indeed changed so much in the last twenty some years as to have a markedly different code of ethics. The argument seemed to brush up against the first amendment, and touch on the argument raging around Free Speech vs. Freedom to Live Unpolluted. What happened to good old Voltaire whose attitude toward free speech, was summed up by Evelyn Hall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire) as “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”? The other part of the quandary is related to a helpless feeling that nothing can be done to curb this affront of running into words and pictures we’d rather not encounter.

The first part of my reaction comes from the blanket statement that people “never used to be this disrespectful.” I hear this not just from my friend but others; it is a version of “Kids these days!” or the converse of never trusting anyone over thirty.

I remember a fair amount of rudeness, only some of which depended on anonymity. I was embarrassed by the boys in middle-school, who mooned traffic from the safety of the bus. They certainly wouldn’t do it in the town where they were known; it was done for the amusement of their fellow passengers, who all knew the culprits. Those subjected to the sight of the bare bums surely knew what school they came from. I heard stories, even that late in the century, of outhouses being tipped over, and of crude comments made on anonymous phone calls.

I remember an equally embarrassing experience in high school when I was answering phones for a public television fund drive, being asked by someone on the other end of the line if I had big boobs and would I raise my hand to show who I was. Not much different in content than some of the blog and YouTube comments my friend referred to. Anonymity played a factor, just as it does on the net. It was calls like this to both public and private lines that spawned caller ID.

Ignorance was as often a key element as being anonymous. In the late 1940s or early 1950s, my dad was learning Portuguese from a janitor. He asked another person how to congratulate the janitor on some momentous event. My dad memorized the words without understanding their meaning, or perhaps the cultural context associated with them. The reaction to the Portuguese was explosive; fortunately the janitor liked my dad and was aware of his ignorance. Both meanness and anonymity were in play.

It goes beyond just the vulgar, however. Living in multi-lingual, multi-cultural communities, I was struck by the intensely personal comments some people will make when they believe they are firmly entrenched behind a language barrier. In my own experience I have heard comments by passers by who assumed I did not speak their language. Often I just let it go when it seemed a matter of ignorance rather than meanness, like remarks about the ugliness of a shirt, or the stench of a perfume. I purposely embarrassed them by replying in their language when their comments crossed the line of taboo in their own culture. If the remarks were sexual in nature, I would be outraged. If, however, the banter was meant to be an inside joke, like encouraging a vendor to jack up his prices, I made sure both the jesters and the merchant knew that I was in on it. This was the sort of thing that would be said in fun to a friend, but in seriousness to a foreigner.

But it wasn’t just the disagreement with the content that bothered me, I don’t like the rude, casual meanness of some of the things I see. It was the amorphous “somebody” who had to fix it that got my dander up. From what I see, the tools of avoidance are out there.

The fact is, on most sites these days (yes, I did a brief survey) there is an option to register your horror at certain posts. You can click a button and choose to label them as spam, or inappropriate, or offensive among other things. Generally there is a threshold number of these objections that deletes the comment from the list. On other sites there is a filtering system based on votes that allows the viewer to choose which comments are displayed, the readers’ favorites, the site owners’ favorites, or all comments. The Washington Post, for example, does this.

There are some sites that are moderated. On these either posts go live, and are taken down for a variety of reasons, or the moderator scans all posts before they go up. This is in part to catch spam, but also to catch comments they don’t feel add in a positive way to their discussion. One of the bloggers at Tor.com numbers comments as they are posted to the articles. When a moderator removes one of them, leaving a gap in the sequence, they also include an explanation for the removal. The message there is clearly “stay on topic or face the consequences.” This is above and beyond the normal run of spam which I see as the white noise of the internet. As to the first amendment rights? One school of thought is that they guarantee the right to speak, but not the right to be heard.

When it comes to email, I use my delete key. I also use the button at the bottom of most spam messages that allows me to “unsubscribe” from the messages I can’t recall having requested in the first place. I draw a parallel to my attitude toward mosquitoes and black flies. There are annoying things everywhere, from insects to weather to neighbors.

Harriet Lerner says in her book “Dance of Anger” that the person that has to change things is the one who is annoyed. The person at “fault” who is quite happy with the status quo has no internal need to change. So I need to figure out how to tolerate the annoyance of comment-buzz, as I do with mosquitoes. I’ve become quite Zen about insects lighting on me on short trips to the garden or laundry yard, and am quite willing to wear stinky stuff to discourage them when I need to be outside for the long haul. I sometimes wear nets, or avoid the outdoors, or choose the time of day I venture out. Or I let them light and have a sip. I choose which sort of weather I encounter. It’s cold in the Northeast, but we don’t have tornadoes. I find myself happier with a meager spring than the random descent of a twister making me think of the wonder of Oz. People are another thing. There are times I can tolerate crowds and times I can’t. I am happy I don’t live in a place where I need to go all agoraphobic to get some alone time. I can visit Boston, and dream about the cultural advantages of living there, but I admit I will only be enjoying the theater and museums as an occasional visitor. On the internet I continue this practice. If there is a place that is rife with rudeness, I either choose to avoid it, or ignore the comments. After all, I am mostly there to see what the author of the site says, not how the hangers on which to chime in. When I leave a comment, I am most often addressing the author, not engaging in conversation with someone else.

I think the biggest difference between times gone by and now, is that it was easier to avoid distasteful things. Now you can be visually assaulted without preparation. I think people are no more rude now than they ever were, but it is harder to hide from those people. I have worked hard to make my peace with what annoys me. I’ve developed my strategies and decided what I’ll avoid and what I’ll embrace. My choices are different now than they were when I was in my twenties. Then, someone looked around my apartment with no refrigeration, no hot water, foam pads on wood-slatted benches (I was living in Morocco) and asked when I was moving back to the States. Huh? “Well, you won’t always want to live this way.” I was astounded, but she was right.

I feel the same way about what I perceive of as rudeness. I don’t think people are more or less rude than they ever were. There was a time when “a glimpse of stocking” was shocking, and now who cares. The same shift has occurred for taboos about religion, and caste. For now, I’m willing to live this way with the choices I’ve made to insulate my own sensibilities. I’m sure society will continute to change and I will as well.

A new set of tools and rules is being built, behind which we can barricade ourselves if we want. What I would find horrifying is if any of these became mandatory, forced down our throats by regulation.