Long-time visitors to this blog will have no doubt noticed the recent proliferation of password protected blogs. I feel like this needs to be explained. Long story short, it seems like these days nearly everything I say or do offends someone in my immediate or distant family. While I haven’t set out to offend people, at the moment I’m struggling with my long held tradition of self expression with the delicate sensibilities of the easily offended. Or, perhaps, I’m just becoming an asshole in my old age. Increasingly, I wonder if the latter is the logical explanation.
Anyway, that’s why I’ve been password protecting some of my blogs, in an effort to protect the innocent. I’ll eventually remove the password protection, when the likelihood of offending good, decent, moral people with my beliefs and opinions is less likely (they’ll read ’em as you post them, but they’re not going to visit the archives). Until the unlikely event that I remove myself to a cabin in the mountains, I’ll either need to password protect some posts to avoid conflict with these people, or I’ll need to stop posting to this blog altogether. I can always go back to writing it down and paper and hiding it in shoe boxes. But man, I did so enjoy that decade or so when I could just write was I was feeling and post it online.
Maybe this is a bitter lesson, that in a culture in which even our grandmothers have Facebook pages and e-mail accounts, we’ll have to be more careful about revealing who we really are and what we really think. The Internet club isn’t as exclusive as it used to be. For better or for worse.
Categories
I believe it’s everyones right to express what they think and feel. I just don’t think it’s ever a good idea to start off with insults or offending remarks to someone or several someones for their action or inactions…as you see them…or their beliefs, however misguided you feel they may be. I think it’s great to say what you think, as long as you don’t reach out and smack someone else for what they think or believe. And I think it’s never any use nor does one bit of earthly good to keep causing hurt to those who are obviously very ill equipped to handle it.
When you can’t talk about your religious beliefs because it will upset your relatives, and you can talk about depression because it’ll upset your immediate family, and you can’t talk about politics because your Right-Winger friends and relatives will descend upon you, then you are, indeed, in a bad place in your life. It won’t be long before someone’s offended that I wrote something about self-censorship. 😉