Today, I received some comments on a post I wrote a while back about our Relay For Life team, the Daddy-O Alley Katz. You can follow this link to see what transpired but to sum things up quickly, a member of another participating team...uhhhh, misinterpreted?...my intent and was deeply offended by things I wrote. In particular, this person thought I was disparaging their efforts and making ridicule at their expense. This startled me as I've taken such great pains in disparaging and making ridicule at MY expense that I usually don't have time to do others. This blog, and by extension that particular post, lends itself to that pursuit. So I apologized post-haste (which is Shakespeare for "with a quickness") and I think hurt feelings have been soothed (I hope so anyway). However, fallout from this incident is that a very large bear has been poked and this team, which already raises more money every year than the gross national products of some small-to-medium sized nations is now even more motivated to go out and make more money. Great for the fight against cancer, not so great for me because...oh, who am I kidding. I'm receiving attention for misbehaving and I'm eatin' it up! It's just like I'm in junior high again!
But if I learned anything from this, which, let's be honest, is highly unlikely, it's that there are more people out there reading things posted on the internet than I had previously thought (I would have capped it at a couple hundred or so) and that those people can be affected, postively or negatively, by what they read. It's just like Spiderman (possibly one of our greatest philosophers) said: "With great power, or mediocre power and an internet connection, comes great responsibility".
And to paraphrase another great philosopher of yore...
ReplyDeleteWho knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men or bloggers or internet readers... The Shadow does.
Just goes to prove that you never know. And that you're a rascal, Clark.