Finally, a good use for the Internet

OK, so that’s a bit extreme. But after spending way too much time online with Facebook lately, I’ve found balance in my life.

First, about this Facebook thing… I admit to being a latecomer to the party. But judging by various associates, friends, and friend of friends who’ve also joined recently, there’s still a lot of room for growth in this puppy. As one colleague said to me, “welcome to the new biggest time waster in your life,” and by golly she was right.

The site just sucks you in with all kinds of mind candy – games to play, events to join in, photos to post and share and comment on, all manner of gizmos to show which movie star you see yourself as, gifts to “send,” drinks to pass around (that one remains a mystery to me), and more. Starting with the “Bill is _ _ _” status report at the top of the page, the site is demonically designed to make you “need” to come back often and update yourself and check on your many friends. That some friends report “other people” who update their status constantly throughout the day makes you wonder if those folks have an offline life. (It also makes me wonder how my friends know this detail about their Facebook friends’ obsessiveness.) I mean, really, is the world a better place for our knowing that “Susie is watching Johnny play in the back yard” (and which is she watching more closely – Johnny or Facebook?)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s been fun to connect casually with a few folks who I’d otherwise be missing. It’s like popping back into lives that had drifted apart. Within limits, that’s a good thing, and just might lead to interesting possibilities down the road.

In the meantime, however, Bill is … not so sure Facebook is a good thing.

Craigslist, on the other hand, is a godsend. For months, I have been grumbling about the clutter in our house. Things certainly have piled up over the years. Toys get outgrown, and boxed, and stored and… dusty. Furniture from a previous generation of dwelling are a bit too nice to be discarded, but don’t fit in the current abode or in our future plans. Dishes. Lamps. Videos. Albums. Rugs. More dishes. Our attic holds a vast store of stuff that fits into the “one man’s trash…” category.

Now that we’ve arrived at the “enough is enough” stage, craigslist is my exit strategy.

I posted several pieces of furniture and some unused toys on craigslist yesterday afternoon as a first foray into cybersales – and much to my joy, I got three bites within a few hours. That’s progress. Because believe me, there’s more where that came from.

If all goes well, I now have a new part-time job. Just like the folks I remember from Downeast Maine who have permanent yard sales in their garages (stop by anytime), if you need to find me, just know that “Bill is… rummaging in the attic.”

Harsh words

I’ve been wrestling this week with mixed feelings about boys, bullies, and the messy rites of growing up.

At my son’s school… well, actually, in my son’s physical and virtual social networks this week, a major rift happened when four boys went onto Facebook and posted a photo of all the 7th and 8th graders from a school outing and then tagged each student’s and teacher’s face with rude, racist, slanderous, malicious comments. They targeted appearance, socioeconomic status, weight, ethnicity, sexual orientation, heritage, intelligence, lack of coolness – everything bad you can think of, if you put yourself in a smartass 13-year-old frame of mind.

The thing blew up on Monday at school. Several girls confronted the boys in the lunchroom. Some kids went to the principal. Everybody talked about it. Everybody knew.

By Tuesday morning, two boys were suspended (I’ll call them Jerk 1 and Jerk 2) for a day, the other two (Jerks 3 and 4) spoke with the principal. Jerk 1 spent part of his day at home (presumably under the watchful eye of a parent?) texting Jerk 3 at school (in blatant violation of the no-cell phones policy) about how he was grounded for a month and sharing their indignation with the lunch table gang about how “people can’t take a joke” and the like. Jerk 4 somehow managed to talk his way out of trouble. A letter came home with all kids that afternoon, acknowledging the incident and repeating the no-bullying policy in bland legalese.

On Wednesday, the principal called an assembly of the 7th and 8th graders, during which Jerks 1 and 2 were made to give public apologies (consensus is that the boys were marginally contrite) and did some public squirming (Jerk 1 took blame for writing bad things about his classmates but baldly claimed no knowledge of who wrote the bad things about teachers, even though his classmates in the audience “all” knew Jerk 3 did that bit). Then the town safety officer spoke about Internet civility, and gave the students a chance to speak and to vent. During this portion, amazingly, Jerk 3 stood up and tried to argue that “it wasn’t that bad – it was meant to be funny.” The audience didn’t much buy that line. After the assembly, Jerk 1 handed out individual, hand-written apologies to the kids he dissed online. Despite the relatively identical nature of his message to each kid, that helped some. He also asked several kids “can we be friends,” since he’s under orders to make new friends as part of his rehabilitation. (Even though he was the ringleader of this debacle, his friends are being portrayed as the proverbial bad influence.)

Anyhow, the week ended today with confirmation that Jerk 1 is a serial offender, Yesterday during gym class he was overheard repeating out loud the same insulting remarks he made online about one of his female victim’s appearance. The girl’s mother marched into the main office this morning packing that piece of info. Jerk 1 clearly has some more lessons coming on the subject of respect…

So, is this “boys being boys” or something more? Certainly, kids have been obnoxious toward each other since Neanderthal days. Name-calling is nothing new – and the more hot-button bad words you can string together the better, right? General stupidity isn’t exactly a rare human condition either. Nor is it a surprise that teens who are left under-supervised will tend to get into trouble. In education, they term such kids “at-risk,” and usually school officials can see these problem children coming a mile away. At worst, they’ll see abusive behavior surface on the playground or “out back after school.”

But in the new world of online interaction, the school doesn’t necessarily see all that goes on. Nor does it necessarily have authority to punish or arbitrate offenses. Parents are likely fairly out of the loop. In cases of cyberbullying, it happens in perhaps the worst combination of ways – acts of abuse taking place within a relatively closed network of individuals who are ill-equipped to respond appropriately. In English, that means kids are online slamming each other without adult intervention and the victims are either intimidated or embarrassed into not responding and left to deal with the hurt or humiliation on their own.

Thank heavens, then, that this week’s particular act of mayhem hit a large group all at once. Almost no one was spared, which helped the victims deal collectively with the pain and anger. That doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to take for the weigh-conscious girl who was called fat and ugly, or the academically challenged African American boy who was labeled a dumb black blob, or the Hispanic girl who was labeled an immigrant whore. Nor for the so-called “Goth wannabe,” the “rapist,” or the “flat-chested” girls. Labels have a way of sticking, even among the best of friends. The stigma can’t so easily be erased.

There is no easy solution. Just as we all did during our own uneasy youths, these kids too will process and (one hopes) shed this unfortunate incident. Out of misery can come growth for all involved. That doesn’t make it any simpler to help navigate or monitor as parents or educators. It just means there’s one more playground we all have to watch.

Divided we fall?

I had an early-morning daydream yesterday while showering (my best place for free-form thinking) in which the McCain-Palin ticket did in fact win the election. But within days of taking office, John McCain died suddenly and suspiciously (in one version of this reverie, he was shot; in another, someone slipped a mickey into his daily meds). In either case, Sarah Palin was immediately elevated to the presidency amid all of the angst of recent weeks and compounded by the aftermath of an assassination.

These thoughts drifted through my mind after reading Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert’s article “Meet Sarah Palin's radical right-wing pals” on Salon.com. This fairly sobering piece of investigative journalism sketches a portrait of an ambitious young local politician who allowed—and seemingly still allows—members of the Alaska Independence Party to fill her head with gun-totin’, secessionist, Christian ultra-right ideas as she’s marched her way from local to statewide to national office. While her husband was a card-carrying member of the AIP until just recently switching to Independent (after all, an obvious AIP affiliation could hinder her political ascension), Palin allegedly has repeatedly used her role as mayor and governor to front for any number of the group’s questionable goals. No surprise, Extremist Number One “Bo” Gritz surfaces in the piece, claiming her as a devotee of his us-versus-U.S. movement. And the neo-Nazis and skinheads aren’t far behind.

The lengthy piece is worth a read, so I’ll say no more about it. But it raised another concern for me. And that has to do with where we Americans get our information and what it means when we pick one media source over another.

For me, at least, unlike any political campaign in the past, the media has squared itself off into distinct pockets of perspective. Certainly, in our nation and many others, there have always been the “liberal media,” the “right wing press,” and every shade in between. It’s been a part of the fabric of mainstream media in much of Europe and in most Latin countries for decades, but it seems to have blossomed most obviously in this country in the last decade. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to identify a truly independent, right-down-the-middle media outlet.

Given my own leanings toward liberal causes, and thus toward Obama, I find myself tuning in mostly to the media Sarah Palin loves to hate. Couple that with a growing desire for a slightly escapist take on all the grim economic headlines of late, we’ve gravitated toward MSNBC for the nightly newsertainment of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

(For anyone who hasn’t seen it or read the text, you ought to watch Olbermann's Special Comment from Oct. 12, in which he goes full-bore against McCain and Palin’s unabashed inciting of supporters to threaten the safety of Barack Obama. It’s a remarkable piece of anger and honest outrage.)

So it struck me the other night, after watching the final McCain-Obama debate and sliding first into one mainstream network’s straight-laced post-event analysis that I wanted—no, needed—to hear Olbermann and company’s more pithy (and mostly anti-McCain) take on the proceedings. I’d watched the debate, and had my own opinion of how the two men fared. There wasn’t much I missed of their good points and bad calls. So an hour’s worth of “yeah, right on!” railing before bed seemed appropriate.

Somewhere along the way, however, I found myself wondering what the right-leaning media was saying about who won or lost or lobbed the best zingers. Fox News and their ilk too have their punchy pundits and their outraged commentators. And they were no doubt preaching to their own choirs and fanning the flames of diehard Republicanism. So what were they saying—and to whom?

In all the sniping and yelling, I am left wondering what wounds this election will leave in its wake. We are a country more divided than at any other time in my life—divided between left, right, and middle; between haves and a growing number of have-nots; between hope and anger and despair—with a media that, for better or worse, encourages the divide. You hear Obama and McCain talking about “reaching across the aisle” to achieve consensus, but it rings as overly idealistic, or pandering, or plain old politics-as-usual, to think that they, or the public, can or will so easily “get along” once the votes are counted. When you have guys with guns in their closets who are ready to use them against fellow citizens (and candidates who will watch their backs)… when you have politicians who will blatantly lie to get ahead, who cynically know their supporters are listening to the cues and winks but not the words coming out of their mouths… when “fear itself” is what we have to fear these days and loathing is waiting in the wings… it’s hard to be very optimistic. I do look forward to a brighter day as promised by the Obama campaign. But today, it feels like behind every silver lining there’s a dark cloud.

[End note: Despite the gloomy prospects, you still gotta laugh. So for today’s bit of levity, click on this Palin-as-prez spoof. Remember… it’s a joke!]