January 2019

Flipping through Twitter this morning, I found a link entitled “Rules for Maintaining Your Sanity Online”, originally posted by Sean Blanda on “The Discourse”. I’ve highlighted the ones I found particularly compelling.

• Reward your “enemies” when they agree with you, exhibit good behavior, or come around on an issue. Otherwise they have no incentive to ever meet you halfway.
• Accept it when people apologize. People should be allowed to work through ideas and opinions online. And that can result in some messy outcomes. Be forgiving.
• Sometimes people have differing opinions because they considered something you didn’t.
• Take a second.
• There’s always more to the story. You probably don’t know the full context of whatever you’re reading or watching.
• If an online space makes more money the more time you spend on it, use sparingly.
• Judge people on their actions, not their words. Don’t get outraged over what people said. Get outraged at what they actually do.
• Try to give people the benefit of the doubt, be charitable in how you read people’s ideas.
• Don’t treat one bad actor as representative of whatever group or demographic they belong to.
• Create the kind of communities and ideas you want people to talk about.
• Sometimes, there are bad actors that don’t play by the rules. They should be shunned, castigated, and banned.
• You don’t always have the moral high ground. You are not always right.
• Block and mute quickly. Worry about the bubbles that creates later.
• There but for the grace of God go you.

This quote from my 1982 high school yearbook has been bouncing around in my brain lately. This was a response from one of the teachers to be included as a caption under her photo. Most of the other teachers wrote things like “knitting” or “filling out sheets like these”, but Mrs. O’Brien wrote this:

While I never had Mrs. O’Brien as a teacher (she taught what was called “Adjustment” or “Special Education”), she was active with the drama club and a couple of other organizations I was involved with. She was the teacher who practically “talked me off the ledge” after an 11th grade Ethics class whereas the class conversation around homosexuality turned, what seemed to me at the time, rather hostile.

I’ve never had the chance to thank her for that pep talk, not even all these years later. But her optimism and her zest for life continues to inspire me.