Linkmeister

Sticks and stones

Yesterday there was a particularly nasty flamewar about an issue so silly it boggles the mind. Someone (not the victim) decided to equate a household burglary with the Holocaust. Had the person whose home had been burgled done the equating, I suspect there would have been a fair bit of head-shaking even by her friends; but a third party decided to do so, which strikes me as more than a little odd. It's not even apples and oranges being compared; it's a damn grape versus every orchard on a continent. It seems silly and unnecessarily hurtful to do that, and for what reason? kd has a better summary than I can add; be sure to follow her links if you have an interest. This all led me to thinking about an old phrase we learned in childhood: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."

That phrase sometimes works with kids, although less often than parents would like to believe, I'll bet; but in a community like the blogosphere, where words are all there are, I'm not sure it is effective. Words do hurt. Words that come out of the blue for no apparent reason hurt even more, I think. Suppose a sheep is being killed by a wolf; if the sheep were capable of thinking, it might figure out that it is part of a natural order of things, and while the personal resentment towards its fate wouldn't change, at least empirically the sheep could say to itself, "Well, my descendants will know they have to run faster and hide better from these wolves." But when a gratuitous attack is made upon the individual for reasons quite unclear, I think that the words are more painful. We've all had setbacks where we said "Why me?" An unprovoked assault falls into that category.

What was really odd about this was the subsequent behavior of the person doing the equating; all dissenting comments were summarily deleted. This is beyond silly; this is delusional. Was this done in the belief that those who disagreed would all forget their comments? Or in the hope that future readers would read the initial post and undeleted comments and nod sagely, saying, "Yup, what a right-thinking person this is. Look at all those other people who agree?"

It doesn't work like that.