Cyber Sticks and Stones are Hurtful

“Sticks and Stone may break my bones, but names can never hurt me”. My mother used to make me recite that over and over whenever I came home from school with hurt feelings from some quip by a verbal sword-smith. I did it, but being the person I was and probably still am, the words lingered around my legs like a low lying fog ready to trip me up a any second.

Recently, another child has taken their life due to cyber bullying. This was a 15-year-old girl in Massachusetts (read the story: http://tinyurl.com/yeox9tk ).

Bullying, teasing, trash-talking is not a new sport for the teenage crowd. The new cyber frontier and cellular text land is a dangerous place for our kids these days. These taunts go beyond the name-calling of 30-plus years ago. They are so inappropriate in language and accusation that I can’t even type an example. And things on the Internet can live forever. That is why the devastation can result in such dramatic results as suicide. The unfortunate truth is much of the verbal slash and slang begins with hurt feelings and spins and warps into untruths that spiral and viral into outlandish lies.

(This is one reason why I discourage chat rooms on youth pages on a website. Unless you have a twenty-four hour cyber-monitor, your forum can turn into an unwanted unintentional problem. It can even go as far as to make your organization or church liable should violence ensue.)

Where your organization or church CAN make a difference is through working as a mediator when cyber/text conflict arises. I recently watched a PBS special on teen girl violence. Where boys may walk away after a fight, girls let it fester and this festering is the seed that can spiral out of control into physical or cyber-violence. The answer needed to calm girls from this destruction seemed to be the simple, earnest apology.

What has happened to us that we can’t say those words? We don’t seem to know how to apologize or how to admit a mistake. As I type this blog, I hear the voice of the television commentator recanting recent stories with the Tiger Woods saga. Here is a stellar example of where telling the truth, saying you’re sorry and admitting a mistake would have left a lot of air time open on our tv’s.

We need to teach our young people and apparently, ourselves, the powerful tools of apology and admittance of wrong. The more we run from these strong tenets of decorum, the more we degrade society and lean ever closer a land of chaff where wheat will not grow.

Trash Talk

You don’t have spend time in a gas station bathroom to read trash about people you don’t even know….

A new book disclosing campaign secrets and admissions by top politicians is flooding the news. Tiger has been exposed for his indiscretions; Mark McGwire has a mea culpa about his steroid usage. All these little tattle segments flooding our airways, newspapers, TVs, tweets reflect a couple of things:

1. The world is moving along okay. No big disasters or tragedies at present or
2. Our society’s brains have cycled to auto-pilot and the technical nonsensical input and output jargon of ‘garbage-in garbage-out’ has polluted our lives and lifestyles… and
3. Folks are making a tidy sum exposing gossip, missteps, and bad behavior.

It is difficult to create good results when given bad input. The term: garbage-in garbage-out. Defined by Wikipedia as a phrase in the field of computer science or information primarily used to call attention to the fact that computers will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data (Garbage in) and produce nonsensical output (Garbage out). Wikipedia also highlights another term off of the garbage-in garbage-out phrase, “Garbage In, Gospel Out” based on the tendency to put excessive trust in “computerized” data. People have a tendency to believe what they read or see on their computer regardless the source. I don’t know if this is the source for all this plethora of gossip, but we are sure getting an abundant crop recently.

We seem to be producing a great deal of garbage-out MORE garbage-out. When did sharing or spewing gossip become such a past-time? It is sad but true that today our societal missteps are gathered up like precious gold nuggets to be profited on by complete strangers. That’s what happened to all those people we’re hearing and reading about. They did not set out to wind up as tabloid fodder. They didn’t intend for this information to become part of your life or my life. It happened.

There are 1, 610, 000 internet gossip sites. Many are focused on celebrities but there is a rise in sites targeting just about everything. GossipReport.com allows you to share dirt on co-workers. Sick of your neighbor? RottenNeighbor.com lets you publicly out that bad person on your block. You can dish or destroy just about anyone on any topic. College campuses and local schools are rampant with gossips posts and texts consuming the young brains of our country, unfortunately destroying many young egos and in some cases, lives.

Controlling this overwhelming trend begins with us, you and me. It starts with our personal censorship and self-control. It then moves to discussions among our family, especially our children; then our friends and co-workers, to groups we deem influential, like our church. The old adage “sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt us” is not true anymore. The Internet is our new bathroom wall. It’s a nasty commentary of our lives and somebody needs to wash our mouths out with soap.

The Light Bulb

How many _____ does it take to change a light bulb? It’s an old joke. Of course, the punch line is “CHANGE?!!”

I’m typing on my laptop as I load programs on to my new ‘big brain’ computer; not a PC this time, it’s an --- shhh— Apple! I’m finally through fighting the viruses, crashes, and all the other stuff that comes with the territory. Mind you, I will still deal with these issues as my new super-duper Apple has a cross-platform where I can run a Windows operating system. Why? Because all the business software I purchased just a few months ago is for a Windows system.

Change. It’s sure easier to say than do. That’s why the old joke is funny. It’s true and a dilemma. Sometimes no matter how much we want or desire or need to change, the process is so darn hard. I desire to walk completely away from a PC system but don’t have the total funding to do this. I must still wade in the water of Windows to hope and work toward the day I can be totally free of my old system.

It’s very reflective of the many aspects we all deal with as we step the stones of life. Change is possible but it must be a deliberate process. It can be a difficult process, so difficult, we sometimes succumb to our old habits. We may know things are bad but the process of change becomes a greater challenge than living with the problem.

I’ve spent the past 34 days painting and scraping plaster. It’s not something I do on a regular basis. I’ve been working to change a house. I hope I never have to do it again but the probability is there will be another paint brush in my future. It’s been a drag and I can’t quite see the outcome as this point in time, but I feel the journey has been fruitful. Like the computer, working towards something new and different with a new home, has been unchartered; at times, stressful, and definitely requiring labor.

Change requires focus, deliberate action, intent toward a goal, and physical/mental movement away from the current status. While I have been doing ‘my change’ over the past 34 days, I’ve wondered what ever made me think this was a good idea. This process is dreadful. My body aches. My checkbook is sagging. Sometimes I feel I have more paint on my clothes than on the wall. I have involved myself in a process where the situation cannot revert back to its old way. After all, my tub, now gone, was living on my curb waiting for the trash man who carried it away right after Christmas and my toilet is still sitting on my patio. I could turn the toilet in to a planter, but there are still those holes I’m staring in the bathroom where my tub and toilet used to reside. I can’t use the facility in its current state, so I must forge ahead.

I leave this entry pondering, is change better served and achieved when it is impossible to return to the former state? When you can’t go back, you must forge ahead. After all, you don’t have to know how many people it takes to change the light bulb if it’s now an LED.