Get A Life.

I just spent an hour reading a website dedicated to bad-mouthing and snarking on bloggers and it was – including the time in high school when I told my grandparents I was staying at a friends house and went to a rave in the Bronx instead, ingesting enough illegal drugs to make me violently ill in an abandoned roller skating rink – the worst decision I’ve ever made.

Admittedly, until a few days ago, I did not even know this useless waste of a domain name existed, and after I commit this to the ether, I’m going to bleach my eyes and promptly forget it once more.

Under the heading of “fundie blogs” there’s a whole forum about “annoying Catholics”, including some near and dear friends. You know, it’s par for the course if you’re a popular enough blogger, a problem with which I have not been blessed. The more people who read your work, the more people who will either love you or hate you. This has always been the case with any artist.

Yet, a whole cottage industry has arisen where people, who apparently have a lot more fucking free time than I do, waste precious moments of their one and only life reading blogs for the sole purpose of being pissed off and then hating on them.

Come on? Are you such a colossal waste of human potential combined with a sad black hole where your heart once was that this seems like a good idea? In sitting here thinking on it for one whole minute, ten things came to mind that would be a better use of your time and energy than participating in this nonsense. We are in the midst of the greatest humanitarian crisis since World War II, and your best use of an hour is to write hateful garbage anonymously on a god-damned website? Perhaps consider a switch to something else:

Volunteer at a soup kitchen.
Read the classics.
Mentor a child.
Visit the elderly at a nursing home.
Raise funds for Syrian refugees.
Take a walk through a park.
Read a newspaper.
If you’re Catholic, get your sorry ass to confession.
If you’re a parent, play with your kids.
Have sex with your spouse.

In recent years I’ve noticed something really troubling both online and “in real life”. People have been attempting to diagnose the many and varied problems plaguing our very sick society, and some people think it’s sexual immorality. Others, a lack of concern for the poor and vulnerable. I’d say there is merit to both, but the real sickness infecting our society is cynicism. Snark. It’s a disease that’s tearing at the tender seams of humanity and is completely devoid of love.

It’s also completely fucking insane. In the hour I spent perusing GOMI, no where were there people offering tremendous and creative alternatives to the work of others which they so despise. It’s hilarious for people who have created nothing of value to contribute to society, who have put nothing of themselves out there – including even their names – to take a dump on others for trying to put something of themselves out there, in a genuine attempt to connect with others.

It’s easy for people who have never been brave enough to risk sharing any part of themselves with others to mock and belittle those who have. It’s easy, and it’s a damned disgrace. Those people are cowards, afraid even to put a name to their nastiness. Theirs are small lives marked by fear, and bereft of grace. The real bravery lies in those who take the risk to share, to make themselves vulnerable in the hopes of making the world, even a very small corner of it, a better place.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt