My Page, or Yours

I have to admit to being somewhat addicted to Facebook.  For me it has become a way to reconnect with friends and classmates from my youth so that we can reminisce about the good ole days. I also spent 32 years in the Army so have friends located pretty much all over the world and Facebook makes it possible to easily keep in touch with them. My preference is to post only feel good or amusing things and cute cat pictures. Occasionally, I will about write something more serious or use Facebook to promote a blog that I have written so that friends who are interested can read what I have written.

I take writing very seriously, as I feel everyone should.  I carefully collect my thoughts and read what I have written aloud to my husband Michael, who is a professional writer and journalist, to make sure my intent is clear and concise.  I have always been open to comments from others on my page so long as they more or less stick to the topic being discussed and remain respectful of the fact that they are writing on my page and not their own.

Yesterday I felt a need to do something on Facebook that I have never in the past done, I deleted several posts from an individual on my page.  The post was in reference to the last blog I wrote on this site, Bad People Do Bad Things, Expect It.  As I clearly indicated in the posts introduction, I sometimes write when I need to figure out situations that I have trouble understanding. I did not write the piece to convince anyone of anything, not did I ask them to pass judgment on anyone person or institution, and I most certainly did not want anyone to incorporate their own baggage, make numerous assumptions, and make a case for why the conduct I had concluded was bad, was in fact somehow justified.

Initially, I simply ignored the comments, actually feeling a little embarrassed for the author that not only were they off topic, but poorly written with numerous spelling and grammatical errors.  Ignoring them didn’t seem to get the point across; they just kept coming, finally reaching a point where they were stating a need for more information so they could “pass judgment” and implying that I had written only one side of the incident, and ultimately that the school had something to hide.  How he came to these conclusions is beyond me given that he does not live within a thousand miles of the community where the incident occurred and does not know anyone who was involved.

It certainly appears that this man has his own history (baggage) with Christian schools and that he was, without any facts or information, assigning any and all shortcomings he had experienced or witnessed to the school about which I was writing.  I, on the other hand, live in this community and know the players involved in this incident. The vast majority of the information I wrote about came from the person I ultimately concluded had acted badly, not from the school.

What is also clear to me is that some people just need to argue.  If you see what looks like a duck, see it walking like a duck and quacking, you don’t need to interview the duck to know it is a duck.  By the same logic, when a person agrees to do something for a certain amount and receives what is obviously an overpayment and says nothing and then complains when they receive the agreed upon amount the next pay period, they are just plain wrong.  Quitting any job without notice for such a preposterous reason furthers that wrong as does stealing school property and making threats against school staff members.

How someone can in one post talk about how the solution to this and every other problem is for more people to go to church and then justify the actions of a thief and an extortionist is lost on me.  If a person carelessly leaves their front door unlocked and someone enters their home and steals their TV, the person is still a thief and has still broken the law.

Were I to give advice, I would say to anyone that writing is a serious business. How you write is just as important as what you write. Spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar are important if you want to be taken seriously and get your point across. The more errors in your correspondence, the less credibility you will have. Lastly, your own unsubstantiated opinions do not belong on someone else’s page, that is what your own page is for.