Thoughts from the North Pond

Someone died recently.  He was very well-known.  Someone else wrote an op-ed piece for a well-known publisher about what the deceased meant to him.  I shouldn't have, but I read the comments.  How depressing.

I don't get it.  Does being online make people somehow think that their actions have no consequences?  Is decency lost on people as soon as they log on?  Ordinary people do not pass others on the street and alert them to their failings.  Why do so online?  I do not have many words to express how silly the online world has become.  I feel very strongly that the internet is among the worst things to happen to civilization in a very long time.  The irony is not lost on me that I am going to publish this online.  

What incites violence?  Quite possibly it is the demons inside one's head.  What fuels that?  I think that for many it's the internet.  This is why I quit Facebook and Twitter.  People are absolutely horrendous toward one another.  Folks, it's okay to not agree with your fellow man.  It is not okay to think that the proper method of persuasion is divisive commentary.

I think the North Pond Hermit really hit on something when he disappeared in 1986.  Maybe he left to be with nature.  Maybe he left to get away from the coming downward spiral of human nature.

"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual." - John Muir