To pick up on something I sorta said yesterday, the blogosphere is a really freakin' ugly place. I spend a lot of my time on the internet reading blogs, letting one entry lead me to another, reading through peoples comments -- generally weeding through it all. And "weeding" is a fairly apt term, because there are definitely some weeds out there, clogging everything up.
No doubt, part of it is just my questionable desire to get myself angry and riled up. As in, angry that anyone could say or think that racist or sexist or homophobic or (on and on) thing, and the pleasure I get from when someone (namely someone else) steps in to lay it all bare and make it right. It's never quite right, though. Those ugly ideas are always there. If in my day to day life, I might suspect that someone's beliefs/thoughts would clash with my own (if he/she spoke up) -- on blogs, those people do speak up. And I don't know if I seek that confrontation out because it confirms my cynical expectations or activates my idealism.
Like this quote I read once, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie:
"Can you hear in my voice that I'm angry? Good. I've been reading a book about anger. It says that anger is evidence of our idealism. Something has gone wrong, but we 'know,' in our rage, that things could be different. It shouldn't be this way. Anger as an inarticulate theory of justice, which, when you act it out, is called revenge."
Yes, anger as an inarticulate theory of justice, but anger as a starting point too. I commented once to one of my mentors that I needed to develop a tougher skin, so that the wrongness of everything wouldn't bother me and so that I could approach it rationally, with a cool head. She said that, no, when you stop being angry, it's because you've stopped caring.
