SKATEBOARD PUNKS TRAUMATIZED ME!

Skateboard punks traumatized me. For example, on the campus of the Ohio State University. This probably would've been in the 20th century. Right in the middle of the campus, about as busy as Columbus pedestrian traffic got, there's a museum and performing-arts center designed by Philip Eisenman. Parts of the exterior happen to be great for skateboarding. I don't know if they've changed anything in the meantime, but back then, they hadn't decided whether the space should belong to pedestrians or to skateboarders, so you had lots of both.

 

I don't know whether the skateboarders were intentionally terrorizing... me. I was going to write, "[...]terrorizing pedestrians," but to be honest, I don't know whether anyone else was terrorized. So anyway, I felt as if the skateboarders were invading my personal space and making me get out of their way, and making no effort whatsoever to get out of my way. Even at the time, I wasn't sure whether there was any danger, or any reason for me or any of the other pedestrians to have to dodge them. I don't recall hearing about any skateboarder-pedestrian accidents, or any skateboarder-bicyclist accidents. 

But it FELT as if they were being very rude and as if people had to dodge them, while they made zero effort not to collide with people. And that made me angry. And so I tried to collide with them, I tried to step into their paths. None of them ever hit me. 

So then there was this other guy. I have no idea whether he was a skateboarder or not. He was on the bike path. Or, more precisely, IN the bike path. 

There was a bike path which went from south and east of the OSU campus to north of it as far as Worthington, and probably farther. And often, when I rode on the path, I was grumpy, because 1) I'm grumpy, 2) various large dogs seem to have been trained to attack bicyclists, and 3) there were a lot of people who seemed not to care whether they were in bicyclists' way: walking in big groups, cycling really slow and veering unpredictably from one side of the path to the other, etc. 

So here was this guy, on the path as it ran through the campus and past an area which was divided up into several soccer practice fields. This guy was sitting IN the path, sketching in a pad.

And I mumbled something as I biked around him. 

And then he screamed at me. Something about how he was just doing what he had to do.

Maybe I was twenty yards past him at that point. I laid my bike down on the ground and turned around and faced him. He screamed some more, something like that I should come on, I was twice his size. 

As if he assumed that I intended to physically fight him. No, that was not the case. I had stopped because I was considering talking to him, telling him I got stressed from having to dodge people on the path, and how, at least as it seemed to me, there was plenty of round NEAR the path where he could have been sitting, without making cyclists have to dodge him. 

But I ended up not saying anything. Instead I picked up  my bike and rode away. I suspected that he might have been crazy, or on angel dust or something, and that an attempt at conversation might have been useless. 

I never had any intention of pummeling the guy. And I was upset to begin with because it seemed to me that he was making it unnecessarily difficult for me not to accidentally hit him.

So it seems to me that either I get upset a lot when I shouldn't, or that many other people are astonishingly rude. Or perhaps both.

Trying To Account For Differences Between Online And Offline Behavior

I'm an atheist, I've been an atheist for 40 years, I've never hidden it, and I've gotten along just fine with a lot of theists and rarely had any problems with them over differences in worldviews. That's been my meat-world experience. My cyber-experience of contact between atheists and theists could not be more starkly different. It has been mostly them fighting and being very rude to each other, and conversations on religious topics are constantly interrupted by verbal abuse from people on either side -- if, that is, there was anything resembling an attempt at discussion to begin with. I don't know what this means. Some possible explanations:

1) I may have been fortunate in the people I've met face-to-face over the course of my life.

2) I may have been unfortunate in the people I've met online over the course of the past 5 years who argue about religion.

3) The people I've met face-to-face and those I've met online may be very similar people, who behave very differently depending upon whether they're interacting face-to-face or in cyberspace.

I was raised by liberal Christians. There was never the slightest hint of my parents disowning me or wanting nothing more to do with me, because I was openly atheistic. A lot of the atheists I've met online were raised by fundamentalist Christians, and they have been disowned and shunned by their families. Over and over again this turns out to be the background of people supporting irreligious billboards and trying to have the 10 Commandments removed from public buildings, and other atheist efforts which I tend to find useless or worse. And these are the same atheists I see behaving very rudely online toward theists -- Christians, mostly -- who are behaving very rudely toward them. (Cousins, feudin' and fightin'?)

So it may just be that the people meet face to face are not those I meet online.

It may be that atheists who come from liberal backgrounds like mine are either hanging out in different places online than I am, or that they are not as vocal as I am about being atheists, or both.

Or it may be that many people's manners are much worse online than offline. Maybe the very same people I meet face-to-face, who seem to take my atheism so calmly in stride, are actually very upset with it, but hide their dismay from me, and take it to the Internet, where they unload in the manner I'm accustomed to seeing online.

Whatever the reasons, the contrast between the behavior I see offline and that I see online is very striking. Perhaps it's very autistic of me to find the difference striking, while the neurologically-typical see nothing strange about people behaving very differently in the 2 spheres.

In Praise of Bad Manners

Now stay with me here, this is a bit nuanced: impoliteness can be wielded to good effect in good causes by people who also know how to be very polite. Not entirely unlike the way that dissonance and noise can add extra flavor to music by musicians who can tune their instruments well and know all the chords and changes and modes. A great part of Mark Twain's genius, for example, of his great gift to the world, consists of nothing but rudeness, impiety, unfair exaggerations of others' faults for comic effect, of taking the low road and delighting quite unabashadly in it and so forth. But it's all done with the style, warmth and friendly earnestness -- the earnestness about friendliness -- which are the heart of good manners.

Lorraine Devon Wilke has just posted a very rude piece on Huffington Post calling for good manners. I've decided to take it personally because the title contains a phrase I use often: "I know you are but what am I?" As if that weren't enough, there is a cartoon on the webpage in which a crudely-drawn girl asks a crudely-drawn boy the very question. That's the whole cartoon. No context. No inkling of a hint what prompted the remark. Groenig, Schultz, Steig or the person who created the immortal "Someone is WRONG on the INTERNET!"-cartoon it ain't. As if no-one ever had reason to say such a thing. Yeah, I say it now and then. When someone has demonstrated that they are determined to be unreasonable and resist any spirit of give-and-take, and nothing remains to be done but to ignore them or mock them, sometimes I mock. I don't apologize. The world needs laughter. Readers of articles like this one by Ms Wilke or Ms Devon Wilke as it may happen to be, need laughter especially badly. She purports to be there in the cause of good manners, and all she does is complain and find fault. That ain't how it's done, girlfriend! Check out Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners. The way to encourage good manners is always, always to accentuate the positive.

And there's always a place for that. But that's not why I'm here today. My first comment on Lorraine Devon Wilke's denunciation of snark was eloquent, well-reasoned and to the point. I quote: "Oh shut up!" It has not yet been posted. I fear the moderation may not have laughed as heartily when they read it as I did when they wrote it. Or maybe they did, and regretted that they felt they had to delete it, bowing to pressure from higher up the HP food chain. So far 7 comments have been posted and another 7 are pending. If some have already been deleted before posting, then only a minority of the comments are getting through. All of them, so far, bursting with praise. I wrote a second comment: "To sum up: you yourself have nothing to say, and so you're going to complain about the way others say what they say. You can't take a joke. The very thought that someone somewhere may be mocking you fills you with a towering moral rage. Got it." I'm not particularly optimistic about that one getting through either. Sadly, some public figures are not interested in a dialogue with their public, no matter how constructive. It's fawn or go home.

As I intimated with my reference to Miss Manners, the way to encourage good manners is to lead by example. To praise, not to complain. And as you may have gotten already from my reference to Mark Twain, there is a place for bad manners. Some people deserve them. Namely, tyrants, big and small. People who have risen to levels of authority incommensurate with their modest talents to lead, and who do not inspire and cultivate those in their charge, but bully and oppress them. Dixit Ms Wilke or Devon Wilke:

"If I were running schools my curriculum would include such mandatory subjects as "How to Become a Good Conversationalist," "How to Intelligently and Respectfully Debate," and "Learn How and When To Shut Your Pie-Hole" (I'm big on that one!)"

Yeah. She's big on YOU shutting YOUR pie-hole. Sadly, very sadly for the whole world, many people of her ilk actually are schoolteachers. Like her they hate the larger world because they can't control it the way they control their unfortunate students.

Here's to teachers who actually like kids, who encourage and channel that wild energy, inspire it to grow stronger and wilder and do great things, rather than punish it. Here's to pundits with a freakin' sense of humor. Here's to impoliteness properly used, to pop the balloons of the buffoons who shouldn't be running the show.