Putting Our Worst Feet Forward

Over the past couple of days, I've been blogging about the prurient interest that's driven a lot of search traffic to my blog and others in the quest to find the "dirt" behind Stephanie Pearl McPhee's recent harsh words about blogging etiquette. The Yarn Harlot's blog went down yesterday due to excessive traffic, too--what a coincidence. It's been, frankly, a bit disturbing to see the feeding frenzy that somehow occurred even without any chum being visible in the waters...it was as if someone had passed along a rumor that someone somewhere might be dumping a bucket over the side of some ship and it might happen within the next few days, and the next moment there were sharks charging the bottom of any ship in the ocean.

But today I got a comment on one of those posts that brough home another point, an important point that just might be the POSITIVE lesson in all this. The comment was from a knitter who said that the knitting community had been so very welcoming and helpful to her. And I realized that the welcoming and helpful stuff most often happens in a brief comment, or even behind the scenes. A knitter who posts with a question might get 50 private emails offering help and information, but there aren't going to be dozens of blog posts and comments across the web pointing out that interaction. In a way, that's just as disheartening as the initial mess...it's just a confirmation that bad news is more "worth mentioning" than good, that dirt is more interesting than kindness. But it's encouraging, too, because it probably means that all those people digging desperately to get the inside scoop on the meanness aren't JUST sharks attacking the bottom of the ship. They may well be the same people who reach out to offer a helping hand to a stranger.

It reminded me of something that we all need to keep in mind, and something that's an extension of Stephanie's original reminder that people are READING what we write: the world only sees what we put out there in front of them. There's a vague idea, I think, that people only show their "best" in public, and to some extent that's true. But so often pride and anger inspire people to speak up where kindness has not, where the nice half or 75% or 90% of their interactions have been low-key and private.

And then, inevitably, someone roars "You don't know anything about me!" How many times have you seen that in a blog war, in comments, on a listserve? And it's true. But who controls that? The only way we can know anything about you is if you choose to let it show, not just when you have something to prove, but in the moments of kindness as well.